
(lass H'tD 



Book /\- 



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ESSAYS 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



SECOND SERIES 



Itieto antr Eebiseti Ctrtttan 




BOSTON 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street 



0« 






Copyright, 1856 and 1876, 
Bt RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Copyright, 1883, 
By EDAVARD W. EMERSON. 



All rights ; 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Houghton & Co. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. The Poet c 7 

11. Experience 47 

III. Character 87 

IV. Manners 115 

V. Gifts 151 

VI. Nature 161 

VII. Politics .189 

VIII. Nominalist and Kealist 213 

New England Reformers. Lecture at Amory Hall . 237 



THE POET. 



A moody child and wildly wise 

Pursued the game with joyful eyes, 

Which chose, like meteors, their way, 

And rived the dark with private ray : 

They overleapt the horizon's edge, 

Searched with Apollo's privilege ; 

Through man, and woman, and sea, and star 

Saw the dance of nature forward far ; 

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times 

Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. 



Olympian bards who sung 
Divine ideas below, 

Which always find us young, 
And always keep us so. 




Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are 
often persons wlio have acquired some knowledge 
of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an in- 
clination for whatever is elegant ; but if you inquire 
whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their 
own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they 
are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, 
as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot 
to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their 
knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules 
and particulars, or some limited judgment of color 
or form, which is exercised for amusement or for 
show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doc- 
trine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our ama- 
teurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of 
the instant dependence of form upon soul. There 
is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We 
were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan 
to be carried about ; but there is no accurate ad- 
justment between the spirit and the organ, much 



10 THE POET. 

less is the latter tlie germination of the former. So 
in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do 
not believe in any essential dependence of the ma- 
terial world on thought and volition. Theologians 
think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual 
meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a con- 
tract, but they prefer to come again to the solid 
ground of historical evidence ; and even the poets 
are contented with a civil and conformed manner 
of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a 
safe distance from their own experience. But the 
highest minds of the world have never ceased to 
explore the double meaning, or shall I say the 
quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold 
meaning, of every sensuous fact ; Orpheus, Emped- 
ocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swe- 
denborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and 
poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor 
even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but chil- 
dren of the fire, made of it, and only the same di- 
vinity transmuted and at two or three removes, 
when we know least about it. And this hidden 
truth, that the fountains whence all this river of 
Time and its creatures floweth are intrinsically 
ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration 
of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the 
man of Beauty ; to the means and materials he 
uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the 
present time. 



THE POET. 11 

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet 
is representative. He stands among partial men 
for the complete man, and apprises us not of his 
wealth, but of the common wealth. The young- 
man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, 
they are more himself than he is. They receive of 
the soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature 
enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, 
from their belief that the poet is beholding her 
shows at the same time. He is isolated among his 
contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with 
this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw 
all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth 
and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, 
in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study 
to utter our painful secret. The man is only half 
himself, the other half is his expression. 

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, 
adequate expression is rare. I know not how it 
is that we need an interpreter, but the great major- 
ity of men seem to be minors, who have not yet 
come into possession of their own, or mutes, who 
cannot report the conversation they have had with 
nature. There is no man who does not anticipate 
a supersensual utility in the sun and stars, earth 
and water. These stand and wait to render him a 
peculiar service. But there is some obstruction or 
some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which 



12 THE POET. 

does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too 
feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make 
us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man 
should be so much an artist that he could report in 
conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our 
experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient 
force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to 
reach the quick and compel the reproduction of 
themselves in speech. The poet is the person in fC 
whom these powers are in balance, the man with- 
out imj)ediment, who sees and handles that which 
others dream of, traverses tlie whole scale of expe- 
rience, and is representative of man, in virtue of 
being the largest power to receive and to im- 
part. 

For the Universe has three children, born at 
one time, which reappear under different names 
in every system of thought, whether they be called 
cause, operation, and effect ; or, more poetically, 
Jove, Pluto, Neptune ; or, theologically, the Father, 
the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call 
here the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These 
stand respectively for the love of truth, for the 
love of good, and for the love of beauty. These 
three are equal. Each is that which he is, essen- 
tially, so that he cannot be surmounted or ana- 
lyzed, and each of these three has the power of the 
others latent in him, and his own, patent. 



THE POET. 13 

1/ ' The poet is tlie sayer, the namer, and represents 
beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the cen- 
tre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but 
is from the beginning beautiful ; and God has not 
made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the cre- 
ator of the universe. -Therefore the poet is not any 
permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own 
right. -' ' Criticism is infested with a cant of materi- 
alism, which assumes that manual skill and activity 
is the first merit of all men, and disparages such 
as say and do not, overlooking the fact that some 
men, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent into the 
world to the end of expression, and confounds them 
with those whose province is action but who quit it 
to imitate the sayers. But Homer's words are as 
costly and admirable to Homer as Agamemnon's 
victories are to Agamemnon. The poet does not 
wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and 
think primarily, so he writes primarily what will 
and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though 
primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries 
and servants ; as sitters or models in the studio of 
a painter, or as assistants who bring building-mate- 
rials to an architect. 

For poetry was all written before time was, and 
whenever we are so finely organized that we can 
penetrate into that region where the air is music, 
we hear those primal warblings and attempt to 



14 THE POET. 

write tliem down, but we lose ever and anon a Word 
or a verse and substitute sometliing of our own, 
and tbus miswrite tlie poem. Tlie men of more 
delicate ear write down these cadences more faith- 
fully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, be- 
come the songs of the nations. For nature is as 
truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, 
and must as much appear as it must be done, or be 
known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent 
modes of the divine energy. Words are also ac- 
tions, and actions are a kind of words. 

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he 
announces that which no man foretold. He is the 
true and only doctor ; he knows and tells ; he is 
the only teller of news, for he was present and privy 
to the appearance which he describes. He is a be- 
holder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and 
causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical 
talents, or of industry and skill in metre, but of the 
true poet. I took part in a conversation the other 
day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, a man of 
subtle mind, whose head appeared to be a music- 
box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose skill 
and command of language we could not sufficiently 
praise. But when the question arose whether he 
was not only a lyrist but a poet, we were obliged to 
confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an 
eternal man. He does not stand out of our low 



THE POET. 15 

limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, run- 
ning up from a torrid base tlirougli all the climates 
of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every lat- 
itude on its high and mottled sides ; but this gen- 
ius is the landscape -garden of a modern house, 
adorned with fountains and statues, with well-bred 
men and women standing and sitting in the walks 
and terraces. We hear, through all the varied 
music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our 
poets are men of talents who sing, and not the chil- 
dren of music. The argument is secondary, the 
finish of the verses is primary. 

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argu- 
ment that makes a poem, — a thought so passionate 
and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an ani- 
mal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns 
nature with a new thing. The thought and the 
form are equal in the order of time, but in the or- 
der of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The 
poet has a new thought ; he has a whole new expe- 
rience to unfold ; he wiU tell us how it was with 
him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. 
For the experience of each new age requires a new 
confession, and the world seems always waiting for 
its poet. I remember when I was young how much 
I was moved one morning by tidings that genius 
had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. 
He had left his work and gone rambling none knew 



16 THE POET. 

whitlier, and had written hundreds of lines, but 
could not tell whether that which was in him was 
therein told ; he could tell nothing but that all 
was changed, — man, beast, heaven, earth and sea. 
How gladly we listened ! how credulous ! Society 
seemed to be compromised. We sat in the aurora 
of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. 
Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had 
the night before, or was much farther than that. 
Eome, — what was Rome ? Plutarch and Shak- 
speare were in the yellow leaf, and Homer no more 
should be heard of. It is much to know that po- 
etry has been written this very day, under this very 
roof, by your side. What ! that wonderful spirit 
has not expired ! These stony moments are still 
sparlding and animated I I had fancied that the 
oracles were all silent, and nature had spent her 
fires ; and behold ! all night, from every pore, these 
fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has 
some interest in the advent of the poet, and no one 
knows how much it may concern him. We know 
that the secret of the world is profound, but who or 
what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A 
mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, 
may put the key into our hands. Of course the 
value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. 
Talent may frolic and juggle ; genius realizes and 
adds. Mankind in good earnest have availed so far 



THE POET. 17 

in understanding themselves and their work, that 
the foremost watchman on the peak announces his 
news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the 
phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the un- 
erring voice o£ the world for that time. 

All that we call sacred history attests that the 
birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. 
Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the 
arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a 
truth until he has made it his own. With what 
joy I begin to read a poem which I confide in as an 
inspiration ! And now my chains are to be broken ; 
I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in 
which I live, — opaque, though they seem transpar- 
ent, — and from the heaven of truth I shall see 
and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile 
me to life and renovate nature, to see trifles ani- 
mated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. 
Life will no more be a noise ; now I shall see men 
and women, and know the signs by which they may 
be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall 
be better than my birthday : then I became an ani- 
mal ; now I am invited into the science of the real. 
Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Of- 
tener it falls that this winged man, who will carry 
me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then leaps 
and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to 
cloud, still affirming that he is bound heavenward ; 



18 THE POET. 

and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving 
that he does not know the way into the heavens, and 
is merely bent that I should admire his skill to rise, 
like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way from the 
ground or the water ; but the all-piercing, all-feed- 
ing, and ocular air of heaven that man shall never 
inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my old 
nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, 
and have lost my faith in the possibility of any 
guide who can lead me thither where I would be. 

But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with 
new hope, observe how nature, by worthier im- 
pulses, has insured the poet's fidelity to his office 
of announcement and affirming, namely by the 
beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher 
beauty when expressed. Nature offers all her crea- 
tures to him as a picture-language. Being used as 
a type, a second wonderful value appears in the ob- 
ject, far better than its old value ; as the carpen- 
ter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear close 
enough, is musical in the breeze. " Things more 
excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, " are 
expressed through images." Things admit of be- 
ing used as symbols because nature is a symbol, in 
the whole, and in every part. Every line we can 
draw in the sand has expression; and there is no 
body without its spirit or genius. All form is an 
effect of character ; all condition, of the quality of 



THE POET. 19 

the life ; all harmony, of health ; and for this rea- 
son a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, 
or proper only to the good. The beautiful rests on 
the foundations of the necessary. The soul makes 
the body, as the wise Spenser teaches : — 

" So every spirit, as it is more pure, 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly dight, 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
For, of the soul, the body form doth take, 
For soul is form, and doth the body make." 

Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical 
speculation but in a holy place, and should go very 
warily and reverently. We stand before the secret 
of the world, there where Being passes into Appear- 
ance and Unity into Variety. 

The Universe is the externization of the soul. 
Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance 
around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore 
superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, 
physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if 
they were self -existent ; but these are the retinue of 
that Being we have. " The mighty heaven," said 
Proclus, " exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear 
images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; 
being moved in conjunction with the unapparent 
periods of intellectual uatui'es." Therefore science 



20 THE POET. 

always goes abreast with tlie just elevation of the 
man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics ; 
or the state of science is an index of our self-knowl- 
edge. Since every thing in nature answers to a 
moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and 
dark it is because the corresponding faculty in the 
observer is not yet active. 

No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that 
we hover over them with a religious regard. The 
beauty of the' fable proves the importance of the 
sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you 
please, every man is so far a poet as to be suscep- 
tible of these enchantments of nature ; for all men 
have the thoughts whereof the universe is the cele- 
bration. I find that the fascination resides in the 
symbol. Who loves nature ? Who does not? Is 
it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, 
who live with her ? No ; but also hunters, farmers, 
grooms, and butchers, though they express their af- 
fection in their choice of life and not in their choice 
of words. The writer wonders what the coachman 
or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. 
It is not superficial qualities. When you talk with 
him he holds these at as slight a rate as you. His 
worship is sympathetic ; he has no definitions, but 
he is commanded in nature by the living power 
which he feels to be there present. No imitation or 
playing of these things would content him ; he loves 



THE POET. 21 

the earnest of the north wind, of rain, of stone, and 
wood, and iron. A beauty not explicable is dearer 
than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It 
is nature the symbol, nature certifying the super- 
natural, body overflowed by life which he worships 
with coarse but sincere rites. 

The inwardness and mystery of this attachment 
drive men of every class to the use of emblems. 
The schools of poets and philosophers are not more 
intoxicated with their symbols than the populace 
with theirs. In our political parties, compute the 
power of badges and emblems. See the great ball 
which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill! 
In the political processions, Lowell goes in a loom, 
and Ljmn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness 
the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory-stick, the 
palmetto, and all the cognizances of party ./See the 
power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, 
leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure 
which came into credit God knows how, on an old 
rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on a fort at 
the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle 
under the rudest or the most conventional exterior. 
The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all 
poets and mystics! ) 

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, 
we are apprised of the divineness of this superior 
use of things, whereby [the world is a temple whose 



22 THE POET. 

walls are covered witli emblems, pictures, and com- 
mandments of tlie Deity, '^ — in tliis, that there is no " 
fact in nature which does not carry the whole sense 
of nature ; and the distinctions which we make in 
events and in affairs, of low and high, honest and 
base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. 
Thought makes everything fit for use. The vocab- 
ulary of an omniscient man would embrace words 
and images excluded from polite conversation. 
What would be base, or even obscene, to the ob- 
scene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connec- 
tion of thought. The piety of the Hebrew prophets 
purges their grossness. The circumcision is an ex- 
ample of the power of poetry to raise the low and 
offensive. Small and mean things serve as well as 
great symbols. The meaner the type by which a 
law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the 
more lasting in the memories of men ; just as we 
choose the smallest box or case in which any need- 
ful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of words 
are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited 
mind ; as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was 
accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he 
was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poor- 
est experience is rich enough for all the purposes of 
expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of 
new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a 
few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would 



THE POET. 23 

all trades and all spectacles. We are far from 
having exhausted the significance of the few sym- 
bols we use. We can come to use them yet with a 
terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem 
should be long. Every word was once a poem. 
Every new relation is a new word. Also we use 
defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so ex- 
pressing our sense that the evils of the world are 
such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, 
mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to divine 
natures, as lameness to Yulcan, blindness to Cupid, 
and the like, — to signify exuberances. 

For as it is dislocation and detachment from the 
life of God thafc makes things ugly, the poet, who 
re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, — re- 
attaching even artificial things and violations of 
nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes 
very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Head- 
ers of poetry see the factoryvillage and the rail- 
way, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is 
broken up by these ; for these works of art are not 
yet consecrated in their reading ; but the poet sees 
them fall within the great Order not less than the 
beehive or the spider's geometrical web. Nature 
adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the 
gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Be- 
sides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how 
many mechanical inventions you exliibit. Though 



24 THE POET. 

you add millions, and never so surprising, tlie fact 
of meclianics has not gained a grain's weight. The 
spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by 
few particulars ; as no mountain is of any appreci- 
able height to break the curve of the sphere. A 
shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first 
time, and the complacent citizen is not satisfied 
with his little wonder. It is not that he does not 
see all the fine houses and know that he never saw 
such before, but he disposes of them as easily as 
the poet finds place for the railway. The chief 
value of the new fact is to enhance the great and 
constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and 
every circumstance, and to which the belt of wam- 
pum and the commerce of America are alike. 

The world being thus put under the mind for 
verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. 
For though life is great, and fascinates and absorbs ; 
and though all men are intelligent of the symbols 
through which it is named ; yet they cannot origi- 
nally use them. We are symbols and inhabit sym- 
bols ; workmen, work, and tools, words and things, 
birth and death, all are emblems ; but we sympa- 
thize with the symbols, and being infatuated with 
the economical uses of things, we do not know that 
they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intel- 
lectual perception, gives them a power which makes 
their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue 



THE POET. 25 

into every dumb and inanimate object. He per- 
ceives tlie independence of tlie thouglit on the sym- 
bol, tbe stability of the thought, the accidency and 
fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncseus 
were said to see through the earth, so the-poet turns 
the world to glass, and shows us all things in their 
right series and procession. For through that bet- 
ter perception he stands one step nearer to things, 
and sees the flowing or metamorphosis ; perceives 
that thought is multiform ; that within the form of 
every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into 
a higher form ; and following with his eyes the life, 
uses the forms which express that life, and so his 
speech flows with the flowing of nature. All tho 
facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, ges- 
tation, birth, growth, are symbols of the passage of 
the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a 
change and reappear a new and higher fact. He 
Uses forms according to the life, and not according 
to the form. This is true science. The poet alone 
knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and anima- 
tion, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs 
them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow 
of space was strown with these flowers we call suns 
and moons and stars ; why the great deep is adorned 
with animals, with men, and gods ; for in every 
word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of 
thought. 



26 THE POET. 

By virtue of this science tlie poet is tlie Namer 
or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after 
their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and 
giving to every one its own name and not another's, 
thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in 
detachment or boundary. The poets made all the 
words, and therefore language is the archives of 
history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of 
the muses. For though the origin of most of our 
words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke 
of genius, and obtained currency because for the 
moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker 
and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the dead- 
est word to have been once a brilliant picture. 
Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the 
continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of 
animalcules, so language is made up of images or 
tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long 
ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the 
poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes 
one step nearer to it than any other. This expres- 
sion or naming is not art, but a second nature, 
grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What 
we call nature is a certain self -regulated motion or 
change ; and nature does all things by her own 
hands, and does not leave another to baptize her 
but baptizes herself ; and this through the meta- 
morphosis again. I remember that a certain poet 
described it to me thus : — - 



THE POET. 27 

Genius is the activity wliich repairs tlie decays 
of tilings, whether wholly or partly of a material 
and finite kind. Nature, through all her Idng- 
doms, insures herself. Nobody cares for planting 
the poor fungus ; so she shakes down from the gills 
of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, 
being preserved, transmits new billions of spores 
to-morrow or next day. The new agaric of this 
hour has a chance which the old one had not. 
This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not 
subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent 
two rods off. She makes a man ; and having 
brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the 
risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she de- 
taches from him a new self, that the kind may be 
safe from accidents to which the individual is ex- 
posed. So when the soul of the poet has come to 
ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away 
from it its poems or songs, — a fearless, sleepless, 
deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the acci- 
dents of the weary kingdom of time ; a fearless, 
vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the 
virtue of the soul out of which they came) wliich 
carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecovera- 
bly into the hearts of men. These wings are the 
beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus flying 
immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by 
clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far 



28 THE POET. 

greater numbers and threaten to devour tliem ; but 
tliese last are not winged. At tlie end of a very 
sliort leap tliey fall plump down and rot, having re- 
ceived from tlie souls out of wliicli tliey came no 
beautiful wings. But tlie melodies of the poet as- 
cend and leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite 
time. 

So far the bard taught me, using his freer 
speech. But nature has a higher end, in the pro- 
duction of new individuals, than security, namely 
ascension^ or the passage of the soul into higher 
forms. I knew in my younger days the sculptor 
who made the statue of the youth which stands in 
the public garden. He was, as I remember, unable 
to tell directly what made him happy or unhappy, 
but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He 
rose one day, according to his habit, before the 
dawn, and saw the morning break, grand as the 
eternity out of which it came, and for many days 
after, he strove to express this tranquillity, and lo! 
his chisel had fashioned out of marble the form of 
a beautifuh youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such 
that it is said all persons who look on it become 
silent. The poet also resigns himself to his mood, 
and that thought which agitated him is expressed, 
but alter idem^ in a manner totally new. The ex- 
pression is organic, or the new type which things 



THE POET. 29 

themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, ob- 
jects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so 
they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, 
tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their es- 
sence in his mind. Like the metamorphosis of 
things into higher organic forms is their change 
into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon 
or soul, and, as the form of the thing is reflected 
by the eye, so the soid of the thing is reflected by a 
melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and 
every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-can- 
tations, which sail like odors in the air, and when 
any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he 
overhears them and endeavors to write down the 
notes without diluting or depraving them. And 
herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's 
faith that the poems are a corrupt version of some 
text in nature with which they ought to be made to 
tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not 
be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea- 
shell, or the resembling difference of a group of 
flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not 
tedious as our idyls are ; a tempest is a rough ode, 
without falsehood or rant ; a summer, with its 
harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, 
subordinating how many admirably executed parts. 
Why should not the symmetry and truth that mod- 
ulate these, glide into our spirits, and we partici- 
pate the invention of nature ? 



30 THE POET. 

This insiglit, wMcli expresses itself by what is 
called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, 
which does not come by study, but by the intellect 
being where and what it sees ; by sharing the path 
or circuit of things through forms, and so making 
them translucid to others. The path of things is 
silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with them ? 
A spy they will not suffer ; a lover, a poet, is the 
transcendency of their own nature, — him they will 
suffer. The condition of true naming, on the poet's 
part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura 
which breathes through forms, and accompanying 
that. 

It is a secret which every intellectual man 
quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his pos- 
sessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new 
energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by 
abandonment to the nature of things ; that beside 
his privacy of power as an individual man, there is 
a great public power on which he can draw, by un- 
locking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering 
the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him ; 
then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, 
his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his 
words are universally intelligible as the plants and 
animals. The poet knows that he speaks ade- 
quately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, 
or " with the flower of the mind ; " not with the in« 



THE POET. 31 

tellect used as an organ, but with tlie intellect re- 
leased from all service and suffered to take its di- 
rection from its celestial life; or as the ancients 
were wont to express themselves, not with intellect 
alone but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. 
As the traveller who has lost his way throws his 
reins on his horse's neck and trusts to the instinct 
of the animal to find his road, so must we do with 
the divine animal who carries us through this world. 
For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, 
new passages are opened for us into nature ; the 
mind flows into and through things hardest and 
highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. 

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, 
narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal- 
wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of 
animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of 
such means as they can, to add this extraordinary 
power to their normal powers ; and to this end they 
prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, danc- 
ing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, 
politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, 
— which are several coarser or finer g^iasi-mechan- 
ical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the rav- 
ishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the 
fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal ten- 
dency of a man, to his passage out into free space, 
and they help him to escape the custody of that body 



32 THE POET. 

in wliicli lie is pent up, and of that jail-yard of in- 
dividual relations in wliich he is enclosed. Hence 
a great number of such as were professionally ex- 
pressers of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, 
and actors, have been more than others wont to lead 
a life of pleasure and indulgence ; all but the few 
who received the true nectar ; and, as it was a spu- 
rious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an eman- 
cipation not into the heavens but into the freedom 
of baser places, they were punished for that advan- 
tage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. 
But never can any advantage be taken of nature by 
a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm 
presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the sor- 
ceries of opium or of w^ine. The sublime vision 
comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and 
chaste body. That is not an inspiration, which we 
owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement 
and fury. Milton says that the lyric poet may 
drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, 
he who shall sing of the gods and their descent 
imto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. 
For poetry is not ' Devil's wine,' but God's wine. 
It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands 
and nurseries of our children with all manner of 
dolls, drums, and horses ; withdrawing their eyes 
from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, 
the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and 



THE POET. 33 

Stones, whicli should be tlieir toys. So tlie poet's 
liabit of living slioiild be set on a key so low tliat 
the common influences should delight him. His 
cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight ; the 
air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should 
be tipsy with water. That spirit which suffices 
quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such 
from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine- 
stump and half -imbedded stone on which the dull 
March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hun- 
gry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill 
thy brain with Boston and New York, with fash- 
ion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded 
senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find 
no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the 
pinewoods. 

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not 
inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites 
in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of 
symbols has a certain power of emancipation and 
exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched 
by a wand which makes us dance and run about 
happily, like children. We are like persons who 
come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. 
This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, 
and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating 
gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found 
witliin their world another world, or nest of worlds ; 



34 THE POET. 

for, the metamorpliosis once seen, we divine that it 
does not stop. I will not now consider how much 
this makes the charm of algebra and the mathemat- 
ics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in 
every definition; as when Aristotle defines sj)ac(i 
to be an immovable vessel in which things are con- 
tained ; — or when Plato defines a line to be a flow- 
ing point ; or figure to be a bound of solid ; and 
many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom 
we have when Yitruvius announces the old opinion 
of artists that no architect can build any house 
well who does not know something of anatomy. 
When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the 
soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations, 
and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, 
from which temperance is generated in souls ; when 
Plato calls the world an animal, and Timseus af- 
firms that the plants also are animals ; or affirms 
a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, 
which is his head, upward ; and, as George Chap- 
man, following him, writes, — 

" So in our tree of man, wliose nervie root 
Springs in his top ; " — 

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as "that white 
flower which marks extreme old age ; " when Pro- 
clus calls the universe the statue of the intellect ; 
when Chaucer, in his praise of ' Gentilesse,' com- 



THE POET, 35 

pares good blood in mean condition to fire, wliicli, 
tliough carried to the darkest house betwixt this 
and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natu- 
ral office and burn as bright as if twenty thousand 
men did it behold ; when John saw, in the Apoca- 
lypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and the 
stars fall from heaven as the figtree casteth her 
untimely fruit ; when ^sop reports the whole cat- 
alogue of common daily relations through the mas- 
querade of birds and beasts ; — we take the cheer- 
ful hint of the immortality of our essence and its 
versatile habit and escapes, as when the gypsies say 
of themselves "it is in vain to hang them, they 
cannot die." 

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient 
British bards had for the title of their order, 
'' Those who are free throughout the world." They 
are free, and they make free. An imaginative 
book renders us much more service at first, by stim- 
ulating us through its tropes, than afterward when 
we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I 
think nothing is of any value in books excepting 
the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is 
inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that 
degree that he forgets the authors and the public 
and heeds only this one dream which holds him 
like an insanity, let nie read his paper, and you 
may have all the arguments and histories and criti- 



36 THE POET. 

cism. All the value wliicli attaches to Pythagoras, 
Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, 
Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who in- 
troduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as 
angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmer- 
ism, and so on, is the certificate we have of depar- 
ture from routine, and that here is a new witness. 
That also is the best success in conversation, the 
magic of liberty, which puts the world like a ball 
in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then 
seems; how mean to study, when an emotion com- 
municates to the intellect the power to sap and up- 
heave nature ; how great the perspective ! nations, 
times, systems, enter and disappear like threads in 
tapestry of large figure and many colors ; dream 
delivers us to dream, and while the drunkenness 
lasts we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our re- 
ligion, in our opulence. 

There is good reason why we should prize this 
liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who, 
blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a 
drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an 
emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the 
waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. 
The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we 
are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it; 
you are as remote when you are nearest as when 
you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison ; 



THE POET. 37 

every lieaven is also a prison. Therefore we love 
the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in 
an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior 
has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our 
chains and admits us to a new scene. 

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the 
power to impart it, as it must come from greater 
depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intel- 
lect. Therefore all hooks of the imagination en- 
dure, all which ascend to that truth that the writer 
sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his expo- 
nent. Every verse or sentence possessing this vir- 
tue will take care of its own immortality. /The re- 
ligions of the world are the ejaculations of a few 
imaginative men. } 

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and 
not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color 
or the form, but read their meaning ; neither may 
he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same ob- 
jects exponents of his new thought. Here is the 
difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the 
last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true 
sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and 
false. For all symbols are fluxional ; all language 
is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries 
and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and 
houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in 
the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol 



88 THE POET, 

for an universal one. The morning-redness hap- 
pens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob 
Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and 
faith ; and, he believes, should stand for the same 
realities to every reader. But the first reader pre- 
fers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, 
or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing 
a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are 
equally good to the person to whom they are sig- 
nificant. Only they must be held lightly, and be 
very willingly translated into the equivalent terms 
which others use. And the mystic must be steadily 
told, — All that you say is just as true without the 
tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have 
a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, — - 
universal signs, instead of these village sj^mbols, — 
and we shall both be gainers. The history of 
hierarchies seems to show that all religious error 
consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, 
and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ 
of language. 

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands 
eminently for the translator of nature into thought. 
I do not know the man in history to whom things 
stood so uniformly for words. Before him the 
metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on 
which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of mora] 
nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats 



THE POET. 39 

them. When some of his angels affirmed a truth, 
the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their 
hands. The noise which at a distance appeared 
like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was 
found to be the voice of disputants. The men in 
one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared 
like dragons, and seemed in darkness ; but to each 
other they appeared as men, and when the light 
from heaven shone into their cabin, they com- 
plained of the darkness, and were compelled to 
shut the window that they might see. 

There was this perception in him which makes 
the poet or seer an object of awe and terror, name- 
ly that the same man or society of men may wear 
one aspect to themselves and their companions, 
and a different aspect to higher intelligences. Cer- 
tain priests, whom he describes as conversing very 
learnedly together, appeared to the children who 
were at some distance, like dead horses ; and many 
the like misappearances. And instantly the mind 
inquires whether these fishes under the bridge, yon- 
der oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, are 
immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so appear 
to me. and perchance to themselves appear upright 
men ; and whether I appear as a man to all eyes. 
The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded the same 
question, and if any poet has witnessed the trans- 
formation he doubtless found it in harmony with 



40 THE POET. 

various experiences. We have all seen changes as 
considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the 
poet and shall draw us with love and terror, who 
sees through the flowing vest the firm nature, and 
can declare it. 

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. 
We do not with sufficient plainness or sufficient 
profoundness address ourselves to life, nor dare we 
chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If 
we filled the day with bravery, we should not 
shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield 
us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new 
religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. 
Dante's praise is that he dared to write his auto- 
biography in colossal cipher, or into universality. 
We have yet had no genius in America, with tyran- 
nous eye, wdiich knew the value of our incompa- 
rable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and 
materialism of the times, another carnival of the 
same gods whose picture he so much admires in 
Homer ; then in the Middle Age ; then in Calvin- 
ism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, 
Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to 
dull peo]3le, but rest on the same foundations of 
wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Del- 
phi, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logroll- 
ing, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, 
our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our repu* 



THE POET, 41 

diations, the wratli of rogues and the pusillanimity 
of honest men, the northern trade, the southern 
planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, 
are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our 
eyes ; its amj)le geography dazzles the imagination, 
and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not 
found that excellent combination of gifts in my 
countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid my- 
self to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and 
then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of 
English poets. These are wits more than poets, 
though there have been poets among them. But 
wdien we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have 
our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Mil- 
ton is too literary, and Homer too literal and his- 
torical. 

But I am not wise enough for a national criti- 
cism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, 
to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet 
concerning his art. 

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The 
paths or methods are ideal and eternal, though few 
men ever see them ; not the artist himself for years, 
or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. 
The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic 
rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely 
to express themselves symmetrically and abundant- 
ly, not dwarfishly and ,f ragmentarily. They found 



42 THE POET. 

or put tliemselves in certain conditions, as, the 
painter and sculptor before some impressive human 
figures ; the orator, into the assembly of the peo- 
ple ; and the others in such scenes as each has 
found exciting to his intellect ; and each presently 
feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a 
beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, 
what herds of daemons hem him in. He can no 
more rest ; he says, with the old painter, " By God 
it is in me and must go forth of me." He pursues 
a beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The 
poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of 
the things he says are conventional, no doubt ; but 
by and by he says something which is original and 
beautiful. That charms him. He would say noth- 
ing else but such things. In our way of talking 
we say ' That is yours, this is mine ; ' but the poet 
knows well that it is not his ; that it is as strange 
and beautiful to him as to you ; he would fain hear 
the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted 
this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, 
and as an admirable creative power exists in these 
intellections, it is of the last importance that these 
things get spoken. What a little of all we know is 
said ! What drops of all the sea of our science 
are baled up ! and by what accident it is that these 
are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature J 
Hence the necessity of speech and song ; hence 



THE POET. 43 

these throbs and hear t-b eatings in the orator, at 
the cloor of the assembly, to the end namely that 
thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word. 

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say ' It is in 
me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, 
stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand 
and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that 
c?ream-power which every night shows thee is thine 
own ; a power transcending all limit and privacy, 
and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of 
the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or 
creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn 
arise and walk before him as exponent of his mean- 
ing. Comes he to that power, his genius is no 
longer exhaustible. All the creatures by pairs and 
by tribes pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, 
to come forth again to people a new world. This 
is like the stock of air for our respiration or for 
the combustion of our fireplace ; not a measure of 
gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And 
therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shak- 
S23eare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to 
their works except the limits of their lifetime, and 
resemble a mirror carried -through the street, ready 
to render an image of every created thing. 

O poet ! a new nobility is conferred in groves 
and pastures, and not in castles or by the sword- 
blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but 



44 THE POET. 

equal. Thou shalt leave tlie world, and know the 
muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the 
times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, 
but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of 
towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, 
but in nature the universal hours are counted by 
succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by 
growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou ab- 
dicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be 
content that others speak for thee. Others shall 
be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy 
and worldly life for thee ; others shall do the great 
and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close 
hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the 
Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of re- 
nunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine ; 
thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long 
season. This is the screen and sheath in which 
Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou 
shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall 
console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt 
not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in 
thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. 
And this is the reward ; that the ideal shall be real 
to thee, and the impressions of the actual world 
shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not trouble- 
some to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have 
the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for 



THE POET. 45 

thy bath and navigation, without tax and without 
envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own, 
and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only 
tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea- 
lord ! air - lord ! Wherever snow falls or water 
flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in 
twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by 
clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with 
transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into 
celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and 
love, — there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for 
thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world over, 
thou shalt not be able to find a condition inoppor- 
tune or ignoble. 



EXPERIENCE. 



The lords of life, the lords of life,— 
I saw them pass, 
In their own guise, 
Like and unlike, 
Portly and grim, 
Use and Surprise, 
Surface and Dream, 
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong, 
TemjDerament without a tongue, 
And the inventor of the game 
Omnipresent without name ; — 
Some to see, some to be guessed, 
They marched from east to west : 
Little man, least of all, 
Among the legs of his guardians tall. 
Walked about with puzzled look : — 
Him by the hand dear Nature took ; 
Dearest Nature, strong and kind. 
Whispered, ' Darling, never mind ! 
To-morrow they will wear another face. 
The founder thou ! these are thy race ! ' 



n. 

EXPEEIENCE. 



Wheee do we find ourselves ? In a series or 
which we do not know the extremes, and believe 
that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on 
a stair ; there are stairs below us, which we seem 
to have ascended ; there are stairs above us, many 
a one, which go upward and ofit of sight. But the. 
Genius wliich according to the old belief stands at 
the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe 
to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup 
too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy 
now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime 
about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs 
of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our 
life is not so much threatened as our perception. 
Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not 
know our place again. Did our birth fall in some 
fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she 
was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth 
that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative 
principle, and though we have health and reason, 

VOL. III. 4 



50 ILLUSION. 

yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? 
We have enough to live and bring the year about, 
but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah tha.t 
our Genius were a little more of a genius ! We are 
like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when 
the factories above them have exhausted the water. 
We too fancy that the upper people must have raised 
their dams. 

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where 
we are going, then when we think we best laiow ! 
We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. 
In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we 
have afterwards discovered that much was accom- 
plished and much was begun in us. All our days are 
so unprofitable while they pass, that 't is wonderful 
where or when we ever got anjrthing of this which 
we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it 
on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days 
must have been intercalated somewhere, like those 
that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris 
might be born. It is said all martyrdoms looked 
mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a 
romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, 
and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on 
every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks 
trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to 
have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual re- 
treating and reference. ' Yonder uplands are rich 



EXPERIILNCE. 51 

pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, 
but my field,' says the querulous farmer, ' only holds 
the world together.' I quote another man's saying; 
unluckily that other withdraws himself in the same 
way, and quotes me. 'T is the trick of nature thus 
to degrade to-day ; a good deal of buzz, and some- 
where a result slipped magically in. Every roof is 
agreeable to the eye until it is lifted ; then we find 
tragedy and moaning women and hard-eyed hus- 
bands and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, / 
' What 's the news ? ' as if the old were so bad. 
How many individuals can we count in society? how 
many actions ? how many opinions ? So much of 
our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so 
much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius 
contracts itself to a very few hours. The history 
of literature, — take the net result of Tiraboschi, 
Warton, or Schlegel, — is a sum of very few ideas 
and of very f ev/ original tales ; all the rest being 
variation of these. So in this great society wide 
lying around us, a critical analysis would find very 
few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom 
and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and 
these seem organic in the speakers, and do not dis- 
turb the universal necessity. 

What opium is instilled into all disaster! It 
shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at 
Jast no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery 



52 ILLUSION. 

sliding surfaces ; we fall soft on a tliouglit ; Ate 
Dea is gentle, — 

" Over men's heads walking aloft, 
With tender feet treading so soft." 

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not 
half so bad with them as they say. There are moods 
in which we court suffering, in the hope that here 
at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges 
of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painthig and 
counterfeit. The only thing grief has taiight me is 
to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, 
plays about the surface, and never introduces me 
into the reality, for contact with which we would 
even pay the costly price of sons and lovers.? Was 
it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come 
in contact ? Well, souls never touch their objects. 
An innavigable sea washes with silent waves be- 
tween us and the things we aim at and converse 
with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the 
death of my son, now more than two years ago, I 
seem to have lost a beautiful estate, — no more. I 
cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should 
be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal 
debtors, the loss of my property would be a great 
inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years ; but 
it would leave me as it found me, — neither better 
nor worse. So is it with this calamity ; it does not 



EXPERIENCE. 58 

fcoucli me ; sometliing wliicli I fancied was a part of 
me, which could not be torn away without tear- 
ing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off 
from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I 
grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry 
me one step into real nature. The Indian who was 
laid under a curse that the wind should not blow 
on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is 
a type of us all. The dearest events are summer- 
rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. 
Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that 
with a grim satisfaction, saying There at least is 
reality that will not dodge us. 

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all ob- 
jects, which lets them slip through our fingers then 
when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhand- 
some part of our condition. Nature does not like 
to be observed, and likes that we should be her 
fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for 
our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. 
Direct strokes she never gave us power to make ; 
all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. 
Our relations to each other are oblique and cas- 
ual. 

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end 
to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string/ 
of beads, and as we pass through them they prove 



54 TEMPERAMENT. 

to be many-colored lenses which paint the world 
their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its 
focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. 
We animate what we can, and we see only what 
we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes 
that see them. It depends on the mood of the 
man whether he shall see the sunset or the line 
poem. There are always sunsets, and there is al- 
ways genius ; but only a few hours so serene that 
we can relish nature or criticism. The more or 
less depends on structure or temperament. Tem- 
perament is the iron wire on which the beads are 
strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold 
and defective nature ? Who cares what sensibility 
or discrimination a man has at some time shown, if 
he falls asleep in his chair ? or if he laugh and gig- 
gle ? or if he apologize ? or is infected with ego- 
tism ? or thinks of his dollar ? or cannot go by food ? 
or has gotten a child in his boyhood ? Of what 
use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too con- 
cave and cannot find a focal distance within the 
actual horizon of human life ? Of what use, if the 
brain is too cold or too hot, and the man does not 
care enough for results to stimulate him to experi- 
ment, and hold him up in it ? or if the web is too 
finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so 
that life stagnates from too much reception without 
due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of 



EXPERIENCE. 55 

amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep 
them? What cheer can the religions sentiment 
yield, when that is suspected to be secretly depend- 
ent on the seasons of the year and the state of the 
blood ? I knew a witty physician who found the 
creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if 
there was disease in the liver, the man became a 
Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became 
a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant ex- 
perience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility 
neutralizes the promise of genius. We see young 
men who owe us a new world, so readily and lav- 
ishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt ; 
they die young and dodge the account ; or if they 
live they lose themselves in the crovv^d. 

Temperament also enters fully into the system 
of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which 
we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about 
every person we meet. In truth they are all crea- 
tures of given temperament, which will appear in a 
given character, whose boundaries they will never 
pass ; but we look at them, they seem alive, and we 
presume there is impulse in them. In the moment 
it seems impulse ; in the year, in the lifetime, it 
turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the 
revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men 
resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it 
as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over 



56 TEMPERAMENT. 

everything of time, place, and condition, and is in- 
consumable in the flames of religion. Some modi- 
fications the moral sentiment avails to impose, but 
the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to 
bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of 
activity and of enjoyment. 

1 thus express the law as it is read from the plat- 
form of ordinary life, but must not leave it without 
noticing the capital exception. For temperament 
is a power which no man willingly hears any one 
praise but himself. On the platform of physics we 
cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called 
science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I 
know the mental proclivity of physicians, I hear 
the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kid- 
nappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man 
the victim of another, who winds him round his 
finger by knowing the law of his being; and, by 
such cheap signboards as the color of his beard or 
the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his 
fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance 
does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. 
The physicians say they are not materialists ; but 
they are : — Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme 
thinness : O so thin ! — But the definition of sinr- 
itiial should be, that which is its oion evidence. 
What notions do they attach to love ! what to relig- 
ion! One would not willingly pronounce these 



EXPERIENCE. 57 

words in tlieir hearing, and give tliem tlie occasion 
to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who 
adapts his conversation to the form of the head of 
the man he talks with ! I had fancied that the value 
of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities ; in the 
fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a 
new individual, what may befall me. I carry the 
keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them 
at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what dis- 
guise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the 
neighborhood, hidden among vagabonds. Shall I 
preclude my future by taking a high seat and 
kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of 
heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall 

buy me for a cent. ' But, sir, medical history ; 

the report to the Institute ; the proven facts ! ' — I 
distrust the facts and the inferences. Tempera- 
ment is the veto or limitation-power in the consti- 
tution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite 
excess in the constitution, but absurdly offered as 
a bar to original equity. When virtue is in pres- 
ence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own 
level, or in view of nature, temperament is final. I 
see not, if one be once caught in this traj) of so- 
called sciences, any escape for the man from the 
links of the chain of physical necessity. Given 
such an embryo, such a history must follow. On 
this platform one lives in a sty of sensualism, and 



58 SUCCESSION. 

would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible 
that tlie creative power should exclude itself. Into 
every intelligence there is a door which is never 
closed, through which the creator passes. The in- 
tellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover 
of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at 
one whisper of these high powers we awake from 
ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl 
it into its own hell, and cannot again contract our- 
selves to so base a state. 

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity 
of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we 
would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. 
This onward trick of nature is too strong for us : 
Pero si muove. When at night I look at the 
moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to 
hurry. Our love of the real draws us to perma- 
nence, but health of body consists in circulation, 
and sanity of mind in variety or facility of associa- 
tion. We need change of objects. Dedication to 
one thought is quickly odious. We house with the 
insane, and must humor them ; then conversation 
dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne 
that I thought I should not need any other book ; 
before that, in Shakspeare ; then in Plutarch ; 
then in Plotinus ; at one time in Bacon ; afterwards 
in Goethe ; even in Bettine ; but now I turn the 



EXPERIENCE. 59 

pages of either of them lang-uidly, whilst I still 
cherish their genius. So with pictures ; each will 
bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot 
retain, though we fain would continue to be pleased 
in that manner. How strongly I have felt of pic- 
tures that when you have seen one well, you must 
take your leave of it ; you shall never see it again. 
I have had good lessons from pictures which I have 
since seen without emotion or remark. A deduc- 
tion must be made from the opinion which even the 
wise express on a new book or occurrence. Their 
opinion gives me tidings of their mood, and some 
vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to be 
trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect 
and that thing. The child asks, 'Mamma, why 
don't I like the story as well as when you told it 
me yesterday ? ' Alas ! child it is even so with the 
oldest cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer 
thy question to say, Because thou wert born to a 
whole and this story is a particular ? The reason 
of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make 
it late in respect to works of art and intellect), is 
the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in re- 
gard to persons, to friendship and love. 

That immobility and absence of elasticity which 
we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the 
artist. There is no power of expansion in men. 
Our friends early appear to us as representatives of 



60 SUCCESSION. 

certain ideas wMcli they never pass or exceed. 
They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought 
and power, but they never take the single step that 
woukl bring them there. A man is like a bit of 
Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it 
in your hand until you come to a particular angle ; 
then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is 
no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but 
each has his special talent, and the mastery of suc- 
cessful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves 
where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be 
practised. (We do what we must, and call it by 
the best names we can, and would fain have the 
praise of having intended the result which ensues. 
I cannot recall any form of man who is not super- 
fluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is 
not worth the taking, to do tricks in. 

Of course it needs the whole society to give the 
symmetry we seek. The party-colored wheel must 
revolve very fast to appear white. Something is 
earned too by conversing with so much folly and 
defect. In fine, whoever loses, we are always of 
the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures 
and follies also. The plays of children are non- 
sense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with 
the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, 
government, church, marriage, and so with the his- 
tory of every man's bread, and the ways by which 



EXPERIENCE. 61 

he is to come by it. Like a bird which alights no- 
where, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, 
is the Power which abides in no man and in no 
woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and 
for another moment from that one. 

But what help from these fineries or pedantries ? 
What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. 
We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough 
of the futility of criticism. Our young people have 
thought and written much on labor and reform, and 
for all that they have written, neither the world nor 
themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting 
of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a 
man should consider the nicety of the passage of a 
piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At 
Education-Farm the noblest theory of life sat on 
the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite 
powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or 
pitch a ton of hay ; it would not rub down a horse ; 
and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. 
A political orator wittily compared our party prom- 
ises to western roads, which opened stately enough, 
with planted trees on either side to tempt the trav- 
eller, but soon became narrow and narrower and 
ended in a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. So 
does culture with us ; it ends in headache. Un- 
speakably sad and barren does life look to those 



62 SURFACE. 

wlio a few montlis ago were dazzled with the splen- 
dor of the promise of the times. " There is now 
no longer any right course of action nor any self- 
devotion left amxong the Iranis." Objections and 
criticism we have had our fill of. There are objec- 
tions to every course of life and action, and the 
practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the 
omnipresence of objection. The whole frame of 
things preaches, indifferency. Do not craze your- 
self with thinking, but go about your business any- 
where. Life is not intellectual or critical, but 
sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people 
who can enjoy what they find, without question. 
Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her 
very sense when they say, " Children, eat your vict- 
uals, and say no more of it." To fill the hour, — • 
that is happiness ; to fill the hour and leave no crev- 
ice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid 
surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on 
them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a 
man of native force prospers just as well as in the 
newest world, and that by skill of handling and 
treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life it- 
self is a mixture of power and form, and will not 
bear the least excess of either. To finish the mo- 
ment, to find the journey's end in every step of the 
road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is 
wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, 



EXPERIENCE. 63 

or of mathematicians if you will, to say that the 
shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring 
whether for so short a duration we were sprawling 
in want or sitting high. Since our office is with 
moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of to- 
day are worth as much to me as five minutes in the 
next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and 
our own, to-day. Let us treat the men and women 
well ; treat them as if they were real ; perhaps they 
are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose 
hands are too soft and tremulous for successful la- 
bor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only bal- 
last I know is a respect to the present hour. With- 
out any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of 
shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in 
the creed that we should not postpone and refer and 
wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whom- 
soever we deal with, accepting our actual compan- 
ions and circumstances, however humble or odious, 
as the mystic officials to whom the universe has 
delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are 
mean and malignant, their contentment, which is 
the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo 
to the heart than the voice of poets and the casual 
sympathy of admirable persons. I think that how- 
ever a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects 
and absurdities of his company, he cannot without 
affectation deny to any set of men and women a 



64 SURFACE. 

sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and 
frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they 
have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind ca- 
pricious way with sincere homage. 

The fine young people despise life, but in me, 
and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and 
to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it is a 
great excess of politeness to look scornful and to 
cry for company. I am grown by sympathy a lit- 
tle eager and sentimental, but leave me alone and 
I should relish every hour and wliat it brought me, 
the potluck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gos- 
sip in the bar-room. I am thankful for small mer- 
cies. I compared notes with one of my friends 
who expects everything of the universe and is dis- 
appointed when anything is less than the best, and 
I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting 
nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate 
goods. I acce]3t the clangor and jangle of contrary 
tendencies. I find my account in sots and bores 
also. They give a reality to the circumjacent pic- 
ture which such a vanisliing meteorous appearance 
can ill spare. In the morning I awake and find the 
old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and 
Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the 
dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good 
we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping 
measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. 



EXPERIENCE. ^^ 

Everything good is on the highway. The middle 
region of our being is the temperate zone. We 
may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure 
geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of 
sensation. Between these extremes is the equator 
of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry, — a narrow 
belt. Moreover, in popular experience everything 
good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all 
the picture-shops of Europe for a landscape of Pous- 
sin, a crayon-sketcli of Salvator ; but the Transfig- 
uration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. 
Jerome, and what are as transcendent as these, are 
on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizii, or the 
Louvre, where every footman may see them; to 
say nothing of Nature's pictures in every street, of 
sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of 
the human body never absent. A collector recently 
bought at public auction, in London, for one hun- 
dred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shak- 
speare ; but for nothing a school-boy can read Ham- 
let and can detect secrets of highest concernment 
yet unpublished therein. I think I will never read 
any but the commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, 
Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. Then we are im- 
patient of so public a life and planet, and run hither 
and thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination 
delights in the woodcraft of Lidians, trappers, and 
bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and 



66 SURFACE. 

not so intimately domesticated in the planet as tlie 
wild man and tlie wild beast and bird. But tlie ex- 
clusion reaches them also ; reaches the climbing, fly- 
ing, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox 
and woodchuck, hawk and snipe and bittern, when 
nearly seen, have no more root in the deep world 
than man, and are just such superficial tenants of 
the globe. Then the new molecular philosoph}^ 
shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and 
atom, shows that the world is all outside ; it has no 
inside. 

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, 
is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, 
Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish 
by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and 
sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the 
beautiful, are not children of our law ; do not come 
out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, 
nor punctually keep the commandments. If we 
will be strong with her strength we must not har- 
bor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too 
from the consciences of other nations. We must 
set up the strong present tense against all the ru- 
mors of wrath, past or to come. So many things 
are unsettled which it is of the first importance to 
settle ; — and, pending their settlement, we will do 
as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the 
equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a 



EXPERIENCE. 67 

century or two, New and Old England may keep 
shop. Law of copyright and international copy- 
right is to be discussed, and in the interim we will 
sell our books for the most we can. Expediency of 
literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writ- 
ing down a thought, is questioned ; much is to say 
on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, 
dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line 
every hour, and between whiles add a line. Eight 
to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and 
the conventions convene, and before the vote is 
taken, dig away in your garden, and spend your 
earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and 
beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a 
skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, 
and as much more as they will, — but thou, God's 
darling ! heed thy private dream ; thou wilt not be 
missed in the scorning and skepticism ; there are 
enough of them ; stay there in thy closet and toil 
until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy 
sickness, they say, and thy puny habit require that 
thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life 
is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, 
sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but 
shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds 
thee dear, shall be the better. " 

Human life is made up of the two elements, 
power and form, and the proportion must be inva- 



68 SURFACE. 

riably kept if we would liave it sweet and sound. 
Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief 
as hurtful as its defect. Everything runs to ex- 
cess ; every good quality is noxious if unmixed, 
and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, na- 
ture causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. 
Here, among the farms, we adduce the scholars as 
examples of this treachery. They are nature's vic- 
tims of expression. You who see the artist, the 
orator, the poet, too near, and find their life no 
more excellent than that of mechanics or farm- 
ers, and themselves victims of partiality, very hol- 
low and haggard, and pronounce them failures, not 
heroes, but quacks, — conclucle very reasonably 
that these arts are not for man, but are disease. 
Yet nature will not bear you out. Irresistible na- 
ture made men such, and makes legions more of 
such, every day. You love the boy reading in a 
book, gazing at a drawing or a cast ; yet what are 
these millions who read and behold, but incij^ient 
writers and sculptors ? Add a little more of that 
quality which now reads and sees, and they will 
seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers 
how innocently he began to be an artist, he per- 
ceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man 
is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk 
is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of 
wisdom is made a fool. 



EXPERIENCE. 69 

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we miglit 
keep forever tliese beautiful limits, and adjust our- 
selves, once for all, to the perfect calculation of the 
kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street 
and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a busi- 
ness that manly resolution and adherence to the 
multiplication-table through all weathers will in- 
sure success. But ah ! presently comes a day, or is 
it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering, — 
which discomfits the conclusions of nations and of 
years ! To-morrow again every thing looks real 
and angular, the habitual standards are reinstated, 
common sense is as rare as genius, — is the basis 
of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every 
enterprise ; — and yet, he who should do his busi- 
ness on this understanding would be quickly bank- 
rupt. Power keeps quite another road than the 
turnpikes of choice and will; namely the subterra- 
nean and invisible tunnels and channels of life. It 
is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doctors, 
and considerate people; there are no dupes like 
these. Life is a series of surprises, and would not 
be worth taking or keeping if it were not. God 
delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us 
the past and the future. We would look about us, 
but with grand politeness he draws down before us 
an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another 
behind us of purest sky. ' You will not remember,' 



70 SURPRTSE. 

he seems to say, ' and you will not expect.' All 
good conversation, manners, and action, come from 
a spontaneity wliicli forgets usages and makes tlie 
moment great. Nature bates calculators ; her 
methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives 
by pulses ; our organic movements are such ; and 
the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory 
and alternate ; and the mind goes antagonizing on, 
and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by cas- 
ualties. Our chief experiences have been casual. 
The most attractive class of people are those who 
are powerful obliquely and not by the direct stroke ; 
men of genius, but not yet accredited ; one gets the 
cheer of their light without paying too great a tax. 
Theirs is the beauty of the bird or the morning 
light, and not of art. In the thought of genius 
there is always a surprise ; and the moral sentiment 
is well called " the newness," for it is never other ; 
as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young 
child ; — " the kingdom that cometh without obser- 
vation." In like manner, for practical success, 
there must not be too much design. A man will 
not be observed in doing that which he can do 
best. There is a certain magic about his properest 
action which stupefies your powers of observation, 
so that though it is done before you, you wist not 
of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not 
be exposed. Every man is an impossibility until 



EXPERIENCE. 71 

he is born ; every thing impossible until we see a 
success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the 
coldest skepticism, — that nothing is of us or our 
works, — that all is of God. Nature will not spare 
us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes 
by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I 
would gladly be moral and keep due metes and 
bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to 
the will of man ; but 1 have set my heart on honesty 
in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in 
success or failure, than more or less of vital force 
supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are 
uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach 
much which the days never know. The persons 
who compose our company, converse, and come and 
go, and design and execute many things, and some- 
what comes of it all, but an unlooked-for result. 
The individual is always mistaken. He designed 
many things, and drew in other persons as coadju- 
tors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, 
and something is done ; all are a little advanced, 
but the individual is always mistaken. It turns 
out somewhat new and very unlike what he prom- 
ised himself. 

The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of 
the elements of human life to calculation, exalted 
Chance into a divinity ; but that is to stay too long 



72 REALITY. 

at the spark, whicli glitters truly at one point, but 
the universe is warm with the latency of the same 
fire. The miracle of life which will not be ex- 
pounded but will remain a miracle, introduces a 
new element. In the growth of the embryo, Sir 
Everard Home I think noticed that the evolution 
was not from one central point, but coactive from 
three or more points. Life has no memory. That 
which proceeds in succession might be remembered, 
but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a 
deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, 
knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, now 
skeptical or without unity, because immersed in 
forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet 
hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the re- 
ception of spiritual law. Bear with these distrac- 
tions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts; 
they will one day be members^ and obey one will. 
-On that one will, on that secret cause, they nail our 
attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an 
expectation or a religion. Underneath the inhar- 
monious and trivial particulars, is a musical per- 
fection ; the Ideal journeying always with us, the 
heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the 
mode of our illumination. When I converse with 
a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I 
have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at sat- 
isfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water ; or 



EXPERIENCE. 73 

go to the fire, being cold ; no ! but I am at first ap- 
prised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region 
of life. By persisting to read or to tbink, this re- 
gion gives further sign of itself, as it were in 
flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its pro- 
found beauty and repose, as if the clouds that cov- 
ered it parted at intervals and showed the ap- 
proaching traveller the inland mountains, with the 
tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, 
whereon flocks graze and shepherds pipe and dance. 
But every insight from this realm of thought is 
felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not 
make it ; I arrive there, and behold what was there 
already. I make ! O no ! I clap my hands in 
infantine joy and amazement before the first open- 
ing to me of this august magnificence, old with the 
love and homage of innumerable ages, young with 
the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. 
And what a future it opens ! I feel a new heart 
beating with the love of the new beauty. I am 
ready to die out of nature and be born again into 
this new yet unapproachable America I have found 
in the West : — 

" Siiibe neither now nor yesterday began 
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can 
A man be found who their first entrance knew." 

If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must 
now add that there is that in us which chancres not 



74 REALITY. 

and which ranks all sensations and states of mind. 
The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, 
which identifies him now with the First Cause, and 
now with the flesh of his body ; life above life, in 
infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it 
sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the 
question ever is, not what you have done or for- 
borne, but at whose command you have done or for- 
borne it. 

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — these 
are quaint names, too narrow to cover this un- 
bounded substance. The baffled intellect must still 
kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named, 
— ineffable cause, which every fine genius has es- 
sayed to represent by some emphatic symbol, as, 
Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras 
by (NoOs) thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the 
moderns by love; and the metaphor of each has 
become a national religion. The Chinese Mencius 
has not been the least successful in his generali- 
zation. "I fully understand language," he said, 
" and nourish well my vast-flowing vigor." — "I 
beg to ask what you call vast-flowing vigor ? " — 
said his companion. "The explanation," replied 
Mencius, "is difficult. This vigor is supremely 
great, and in the highest degree unbending. Nour- 
ish it correctly and do it no injury, and it will fill 
up the vacancy between heaven and earth. This 



EXPERIENCE. 75 

vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, 
and leaves no hunger." — In our more correct writ- 
ing we give to this generalization the name of Be- 
ing, and thereby confess that we have arrived as far 
as we can go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe 
that we have not arrived at a wall, but at intermi- 
nable oceans. Our life seems not present so much 
as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is 
wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor. 
Most of life seems to be mere advertisement of fac- 
ulty ; information is given us not to sell ourselves 
cheap ; that we are very great. So, in particulars, 
our greatness is always in a tendency or direction, 
not in an action. It is for us to believe in the rule, 
not in the exception. The noble are thus known 
from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of 
the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning 
the immortality of the soul or the like, but the uni- 
versal impulse to believe^ that is the material cir- 
cumstance and is the principal fact in the history 
of the globe. Shall we describe this cause as that 
which works directly ? The spirit is not helpless 
or needful of mediate organs. It has plentiful 
powers and direct effects. 1 am explained without 
explaining, I am felt without acting, and where I 
am not. Therefore all just persons are satisfied 
with their own praise. They refuse to explain 
diemselves, and are content that new actions should 



76 REALITY. 

do them that office. Tliey believe that we com- 
municate without speech and above speech, and 
that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to 
our friends, at whatever distance ; for the influence 
of action is not to be measured by miles. Why 
should I fret myself because a circumstance has 
occurred which hinders my presence where I was 
expected ? If I am not at the meeting, my pres- 
ence where I am should be as useful to the com- 
monwealth of friendship and wisdom, as would be 
my presence in that place. I exert the same qual- 
ity of power in all places. Thus journeys the 
mighty Ideal before us ; it never was known to fall 
into the rear. No man ever came to an experience 
which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a 
better. Onward and onward ! In liberated mo- 
ments we know that a new picture of life and duty 
is already possible ; the elements already exist in 
many minds around you of a doctrine of life which 
shall transcend any written record we have. The 
new statement will comprise the skepticisms as well 
as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed 
shall be formed. For skepticisms are not gratui- 
tous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirma- 
tive statement, and the new philosophy must take 
them in and make affirmations outside of them, 
just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs. 
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the 



EXPERIENCE. T7 

discovery we have made that we exist. That dis- 
covery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards 
we suspect our instruments. We have learned that 
we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we 
have no means of correcting these colored and dis- 
torting lenses which we are, or of computing the 
amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject- 
lenses have a creative power ; perhaps there are no 
objects. Once we lived in what we saw ; now, the 
rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens 
to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, per- 
sons, letters, religions, objects, successively tumble 
in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and 
literature are s abjective phenomena ; every evil and 
every good thing is a shadow which we cast. The 
street is full of humiliations to the proud. As the 
fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery and 
make them wait on his guests at table, so the cha- 
grins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at 
once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the 
street, shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and 
threaten or insult whatever is threatenable and 
insultable in us. 'T is the same with our idolatries. 
People forget that it is the eye which makes the 
horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes 
this or that man a type or representative of human- 
ity, with the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the 
"providential man," is a good man on whom ma.ny 



78 SUBJECT OR THE ONE. 

people are agreed tliat tliese optical laws shall take 
effect. By love on one part and by forbearance to 
press objection on the other part, it is for a time 
settled that we will look at him in the centre of the 
horizon, and ascribe to him the properties that will 
attach to any man so seen. But the longest lov6 
or aversion has a speedy term. The great and 
crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants 
all relative existence and ruins the kingdom of 
mortal friendship and love. Marriage (in what is 
called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of 
the inequality between every subject and every ob- 
ject. The subject is the receiver of Godhead, and 
at every comparison must feel his being enhanced 
by that cryj)tic might. Though not in energy, yet 
by presence, this magazine of substance cannot be 
otherwise than felt ; nor can any force of intellect 
attribute to the object the proper deity which sleeps 
or wakes forever in every subject. Never can love 
make consciousness and ascription equal in force. 
There will be the same gulf between every me 
and thee as between the original and the picture. 
The universe is the bride of the soul. All pri- 
vate sympathy is partial. Two human beings are 
like globes, which can touch only in a point, and 
whilst they remain in contact all other points of 
each of the spheres are inert; their turn must 
also come, and the longer a particular union lasts 



EXPERIENCE. 79 

the more energy of appetency tlie parts not in union 
acquire. 

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor 
doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be 
chaos. The soul is not twin-born but the only 
begotten, and though revealing itself as child in 
time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and univer- 
sal power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every 
act betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in 
ourselves as we do not believe in others. We per- 
mit all things to ourselves, and that which we call 
sin in others is experiment for us. It is an in^ 
stance of our faith in ourselves that men never 
speak of crime as lightly as they think ; or every 
man thinks a latitude safe for himself which is nOr 
wise to be indulged to another. The act looks very 
differently on the inside and on the outside ; in its 
quality and in its consequences. Murder in the 
murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and 
romancers will have it ; it does not unsettle him or 
fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles ; it is 
an act quite easy to be contemplated ; but in its 
sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangle and con- 
founding of all relations. Especially the crimes 
that spring from love seem right and fair from 
the actor's point of view, but when acted are found 
destructive of society. No man at last believes 
that he can be lost, or that the crime in him is as 



80 SUBJECT OR THE ONE. 

black as in the felon. Because tlie intellect qual- 
ifies in our own case the moral judgments. For 
there is no crime to the intellect. That is antino- 
mian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as 
fact. " It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," 
said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intel- 
lect. To it, the world is a problem in mathematics 
or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise 
and blame and all weak emotions. Ail stealing is 
comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who 
does not steal ? Saints are sad, because they behold 
sin (even when they speculate), from the point of 
view of the conscience, and not of the intellect ; a 
confusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought, 
is a diminution, or less ; seen from the conscience 
or wiU, it is pravity or had. The intellect names 
it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The 
conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. 
This it is not ; it has an objective existence, but no 
subjective. 

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, 
and every object fall successively into the subject 
itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges ; all 
things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so 
I see ; use what language we will, we can never say 
anything but what we are ; Hermes, Cadmus, Co- 
lumbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's minis- 
ters. Instead of feeling a poverty when we encoun- 



EXPERIENCE. 81 

ter a great man, let us treat the new comer like a 
travelling geologist who passes through our estate 
and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, 
in our brush pasture. The partial action of each 
strong mind in one direction is a telescope for the 
objects on which it is pointed. But every other 
part of knowledge is to be pushed to the same ex- 
travagance, ere the soul attains her due sphericity. 
Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own 
tail? If you could look with her eyes you might 
see her surrounded with hundreds of figures per- 
forming complex dramas, with tragic and comic is- 
sues, long conversations, many characters, many ups 
and downs of fate, — and meantime it is only puss 
and her tail. How long before our masquerade will 
end its noise of tambourines, laughter, and shout- 
ing, and we shall find it was a solitary performance ? 
A subject and an object, — it takes so much to 
make the galvanic circuit complete, but magnitude 
adds nothing. What imports it whether it is Kep- 
ler and the sphere, Columbus and America, a reader 
and his book, or puss with her tail ? 

It is true that all the muses and love and religion 
hate these developments, and will find a way to 
punish the chemist who publishes in the parlor the 
secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too 
little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things 
under private aspects, or saturated with our humors. 



82 SUBJECT OR THE ONE. 

And yet is tlie God tlie native of these bleak rocks. 
That need makes in morals the capital virtue of 
self -trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, how- 
ever scandalous, and by more vigorous self-recover- 
ies, after the sallies of action, possess our axis more 
firmly. The life of truth is cold and so far mourn- 
ful ; but it is not the slave of tears, contritions and 
perturbations. It does not attempt another's work, 
nor adopt another's facts. It is a main lesson of 
wisdom to know your own from another's. I have 
learned that I cannot dispose of other people's 
facts ; but I possess such a key to my own as per- 
suades me, against all their denials, that they also 
have a key to theirs. A sympathetic person is 
placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drown- 
ing men, who all catch at him, and if he give so 
much as a leg or a finger they will drown him. 
They wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their 
vices, but not from their vices. Charity would be 
wasted on this poor waiting on the symptoms. A 
wise and hardy physician will say, Come out of 
that.) as the first condition of advice. 

In this our talking America we are ruined by our 
good nature and listening on all sides. This com- 
pliance takes away the power of being greatly use- 
ful. A man should not be able to look other than 
directly and forthright. A preoccupied attention 
is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of 



EXPERIENCE. 83 

other people; an attention, and to an aim wliich 
makes tlieir wants frivolous. This is a divine an- 
swer, and leaves no appeal and no hard thoughts. 
In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of ^schy- 
lus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the Furies 
sleep on the threshold. The face of the god ex- 
presses a shade of regret and compassion, but is calm 
with the conviction of the irreconcilableness of the 
two spheres. He is born into other politics, into 
the eternal and beautiful. The man at his feet asks 
for his interest in turmoils of the earth, into which 
his nature cannot enter. And the Eumenides there 
lying express pictoripJly tliis disparity. The god is 
surcharged with his divine destiny. 

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Sur- 
prise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are threads 
on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I 
dare not assume to give their order, but I name 
them as I find them in my way. I know better than 
to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a 
fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very 
confidently announce one or another law, which 
throws itself into relief and form, but I am too 
young yet by some ages to compile a code. I gos- 
sip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. 
I have seen many fair pictures not in vain. A won- 
derful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I 



84 EXPERIENCE. 

was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who 
will ask Where is the fruit ? I find a private fruit 
sufficient. This is a fruit, — that I should not ask 
for a rash effect from meditations, counsels and the 
hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand 
a result on this town and county, an overt effect 
on the instant month and year. The effect is deep 
and secular as the cause. It works on periods in 
which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is recep- 
tion ; I am and I have : but I do not get, and when 
I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did 
not. I worship with wonder the great Fortune. 
My reception has been so large, that I am not an- 
noyed by receiving this or that superabundantly. 
I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb, 
In for a mill^ in for a million. When I receive a 
new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the 
account square, for if I should die I could not make 
the account square. The benefit overran the merit 
the first day, and has overrun the merit ever since. 
The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the re- 
ceiving. 

Also that hankering after an overt or practical 
effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest 
I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of 
doing. Life wears to me a visionary face. Hard- 
est roughest action is visionary also. It is but a 
choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People 



EXPERIENCE. 85 

disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and 
urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if 
only I could know. That is an august entertain- 
ment, and would suffice me a great while. To 
know a little would be worth the expense of this 
world. I hear always the law of Adrastia, " that 
every soul which had acquired any truth, should be 
safe from harm until another period." 

I know that the world I converse with in the city 
and in the farms, is not the world I tliink, I ob- 
serve that difference, and shall observe it. One 
day I shall know the value and law of this dis- 
crepance. But I have not found that much was 
gained by manipular attempts to realize the world 
of thought. Many eager persons successively make 
an experiment in this way, and make themselves 
ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, they 
foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. Worse, 
I observe that in the history of mankind there is 
never a solitary example of success, — taking 
their own tests of success. I say this polemically, 
or in reply to the inquiry, Why not realize your 
world ? But far be from me the despair which 
prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism ; — since 
there never was a right endeavor but it succeeded. 
Patience and patience, we shall win at the last. 
We must be very suspicious of the deceptions 
of the element of time. It takes a good deal of 



86 EXPERIENCE. 

time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dol- 
lars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and 
an insight which becomes the light of our life. We 
dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the house- 
hold with our wives, and these things make no im- 
pression, are forgotten next week ; but, in the soli- 
tude to which every man is always returning, he 
has a sanity and revelations which in his passage 
into new worlds he will carry with him. Never 
mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat ; up again, 
old heart I — it seems to say, — there is victory yet 
for all justice ; and the true romance which the 
world exists to realize will be the transformation of 
genius into practical power. 



CHARACTER. 



The sun set ; but set not his hope : 
Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up s 
Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye : 
And matched his sufferance sublime 
The taciturnity of time. 
He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the Age of Gold again : 
His action won such reverence sweet, 
As hid all measure of the feat. 



Work of his hand 
He nor commends nor grieves I 
Pleads for itself the fact ; 
As unrepenting Nature leaves 
Her every act. 



III. 

CHARACTER. 



I HAVE read that those who listened to Lord 
Chatham felt that there was something finer in the 
man than any thing which he said. It has been 
complained of our brilliant English historian of the 
Erench Revolution that when he has told all his 
facts about Mirabeau, they do not justify his esti- 
mate of his genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cle- 
omenes, and others of Plutarch's heroes, do not 
in the record of facts equal their own fame. Sir 
Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Ras» 
leigh, are men of great figure and of few deeds. 
We cannot find the smallest part of the personal 
weight of Washington in the narrative of his ex- 
ploits. The authority of the name of Schiller is 
too great for his books. This inequality of the 
reputation to the works or the anecdotes is not 
accounted for by saying that the reverberation 
is longer than the thunder-clap, but somewhat re- 
sided in these men which begot an expectation that 
outran all their performance. The largest part of 



90 CHARACTER. 

tlieir power was latent. This is tliat whicli we call 
Character, — a reserved force, which acts directly 
by presence and without means. It is conceived 
of as a certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar or 
Genius, by whose impulses the man is guided but 
whose counsels he cannot impart ; which is com- 
pany for him, so that such men are often solitary, 
or if they chance to be social, do not need society 
but can entertain themselves very well alone. The 
purest literary talent appears at one time great, at 
another time small, but character is of a stellar and 
undiminishable greatness. What others effect by 
talent or by eloquence, this man accomplishes by 
some magnetism. "Half his strength he put not 
forth." His victories are by demonstration of su- 
periority, and not by crossing of bayonets. He 
conquers because his arrival alters the face of af- 
fairs. " O lole ! how did you know that Hercules 
was a god ? " " Because," answered lole, " I was 
content the moment my eyes fell on him. When 
I beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him 
offer battle, or at least guide his horses in the char- 
iot-race ; but Hercules did not wait for a contest ; 
he conquered whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or 
whatever thing he did." Man, ordinarily a pen- 
dant to events, only half attached, and that awk- 
wardly, to the world he lives in, in these examples 
appears to share the life of things, and to be an ex- 



CHARACTER, 91 

pression of the same laws wliich control tlie tides 
aud tlie sun, numbers and quantities. 

But to use a more modest illustration and nearer 
home, I observe that in our political elections, 
where this element, if it appears at all, can only 
occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently under- 
stand its incomparable rate. The people know 
that they need in their representative much more 
than talent, namely the power to make his talent 
trusted. They cannot come at their ends by send- 
ing to Congress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, 
if he be not one who, before he was appointed by 
the people to represent them, was appointed by 
Almighty God to stand for a fact, — invincibly 
persuaded of that fact in himself, — so that the 
most confident and the most violent persons learn 
that here is resistance on which both impudence 
and terror are wasted, namely faith in a fact. The 
men who carry their points do not need to inquire 
of their constituents what they should say, but are 
themselves the country which they represent ; no- 
where are its emotions or opinions so instant and 
true as in them ; nowhere so pjire from a selfish 
infusion. The constituency at home hearkens to 
their words, watches the color of their cheek, and 
therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our public 
assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. 
Our frank countrymen of the west and south have 



92 CHARACTER. 

a taste for character, and like to know wkether the 
New Englancler is a substantial man, or whether 
the hand can pass through him. 

The same motive force appears in trade. There 
are geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the 
State, or letters ; and the reason why this or that 
man is fortunate is not to be told. It lies in the 
man; that is all anybody can tell you about it. 
See him and you will know as easily why he suc- 
ceeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would compre- 
hend his fortune. In the new objects we recognize 
the old game, the habit of fronting the fact, and not 
dealing with it at second hand, through the percep- 
tions of somebody else. Nature seems to authorize 
trade, as soon as you see the natural merchant, who 
appears not so much a private agent as her factor 
and Minister of Commerce. His natural probity 
combines with his insight into the fabric of society 
to put him above tricks, and he communicates to 
all his own faith that contracts are of no private 
interpretation. The habit of his mind is a refer- 
ence to standards of natural equity and public ad- 
vantage ; and he inspires respect and the wish to 
deal with him, both for the quiet spirit of honor 
which attends him, and for the intellectual pastime 
which the spectacle of so much ability affords. 
This immensely stretched trade, which makes the . 
capes of the Southern Ocean his wharves and the 



CHARACTER. 93 

Atlantic Sea his familiar port, centres in his brain 
only ; and nobody in the universe can make his 
place good. In his parlor I see very well that he 
has been at hard work this morning, with that 
knitted brow and that settled humor, which all his 
desire to be courteous cannot shake off. I see 
plainly how many firm acts have been done ; how 
many valiant noes have this day been spoken, 
when others would have uttered ruinous yeas, I 
see, with the pride of art and skill of masterly 
arithmetic and power of remote combination, the 
consciousness of being an agent and playfellow of 
the original laws of the world. He too believes 
that none can supply him, and that a man must be 
born to trade or he cannot learn it. 

This virtue draws the mind more when it ap- 
pears in action to ends not so mixed. It works 
with most energy in the smallest companies and in 
private relations. In all cases it is an extraordi- 
nary and incomputable agent. The excess of phys- 
ical strength is paralyzed by it. Higher natures 
overpower lower ones by affecting them with a cer- 
tain sleep. The faculties are locked up, and offer 
no resistance. Perhaps that is the universal law. 
When the high cannot bring up the low to itself, 
it benumbs it, as man charms down the resistance 
of the lower animals. Men exert on each other a 
similar occult power. How often has the influence 



94 CHARACTER. 

of a true master realized all tlie tales of magic ! A 
river of command seemed to run dowii from his 
eyes into all those who beheld him, a torrent of 
strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which 
pervaded them with his thoughts and colored all 
events with the hue of his mind. " What means 
did you employ ? " was the question asked of the 
wife of Concini, in regard to her treatment of Mary 
of Medici ; and the answer was, " Only that influ- 
ence which every strong mind has over a weak 
one." Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle oif the irons 
and transfer them to the person of Hippo or Thra- 
so the turnkey? Is an iron handcuff so immu- 
table a bond ? Suppose a slaver on the coast of 
Guinea should take on board a gang of negroes 
which should contain persons of the stamp of Tous- 
saint L'Ouverture : or, let us fancy, under these 
swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons in 
chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the rela- 
tive order of the ship's company be the same ? Is 
there nothing but rope and iron ? Is there no love, 
no reverence ? Is there never a glimpse of right 
in a poor slave-captain's mind ; and cannot these be 
supposed available to break or elude or in any 
manner overmatch the tension of an inch or two of 
iron ring ? 

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and 
all nature cooperates with it. The reason why we 



CHARACTER. 95 

feel one man's presence and do not feel another's 
is as simple as gravity. Truth is tlie summit of 
being; justice is tlie application of it to affairs. 
All individual natures stand in a scale, according 
to the purity of tliis element in them. The will of 
the pure runs down from them into other natures, 
as water runs down from a higher into a lower ves- 
sel. This natural force is no more to be withstood 
than any other natural force. We can drive a 
stone upward for a moment into the air, but it is 
yet true that all stones will forever fall ; and what- 
ever instances can be quoted of unpunished theft, 
or of a lie which somebody credited, justice must 
prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to make it- 
self believed.* Character is this moral order seen 
through the medium of an individual nature. An 
individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty 
and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large 
no longer. Now, the universe is a close or poundo 
All things exist in the man tinged with the man- 
ners of his soul. With what quality is in him he 
infuses all nature that he can reach ; nor does he 
tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long a 
curve Soever, all his regards return into his own 
good at last. He animates all he can, and he sees 
only what he animates. He encloses the world, as 
the patriot does his country, as a material basis for 
his character, and a theatre for action. A healthy 



96 CHARACTER. 

soul stands united with the Just and the True, as 
the magnet arranges itself with the pole ; so that he 
stands to all beholders like a transparent object be- 
twixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys to- 
wards the sun, journeys towards that person. He 
is thus the medium of the highest influence to all 
who are not on the same level. Thus men of char- 
acter are the conscience of the society to which they 
belong. 

The natural measure of this power is the resist- 
ance of circumstances. Impure men consider life 
as it is reflected in opinions, events, and persons. 
They cannot see the action until it is done. Yet 
its moral element preexisted in the actor, and its 
quality as right or wrong it was easy to predict. 
Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive 
^ and a negative pole. There is a male and a female, 
a spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is 
the positive, the event is the negative. Will is the 
north, action the south pole. Character may be 
ranked as having its natural place in the north. It 
shares the magnetic currents of the system. The 
feeble souls are drawn to the south or negative 
pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the action. 
They never behold a principle until it is lodged in 
a person. They do not wish to be lovely, but to be 
loved. Men of character like to hear of their faults ; 
the other class do not like to hear of faults ; they 



CHARACTER. 97 

worship events ; secure to tliem a fact, a connection, 
a certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask 
no more. The hero sees that the event is ancil- 
lary ; it must follow liim. A given order of events 
has no power to secure to him the satisfaction 
which the imagination attaches to it ; the soul of 
goodness escapes from any set of circumstances ; 
whilst prosperity belongs to a certain mind, and 
will introduce that power and victory which is its 
natural fruit, into any order of events. No change 
of circumstances can repair a defect of character. 
We boast our emancipation from many supersti- 
tions ; but if we have broken any idols it is through 
a transfer of the idolatry. What have I gained, 
that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove or to Nep- 
tune, or a mouse to Hecate ; that I do not tremble 
before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or 
the Calvinistic Judgment-day, — if I quake at opin- 
ion, the public opinion as we call it ; or at the threat 
of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or pov- 
erty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, or 
of murder ? If I quake, what matters it what I 
quake at ? Our proper vice takes form in one or 
another shape, according to the sex, age, or temper- 
ament of the person, and, if we are capable of fear, 
will readily find terrors. The covetousness or the 
malignity which saddens me when I ascribe it to so- 
ciety, is my own. I am always environed by myself » 



98 CHARACTER. 

On the other part, rectitude is a perpetual victory, 
celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which 
is joy fixed or habitual. It is disgraceful to fly 
to events for confirmation of our truth and worth. 
The capitalist does not run every hour to the broker 
to coin his advantages into current money of the 
realm ; he is satisfied to read in the quotations of 
the market that his stocks have risen. The same 
transport which the occurrence of the best events in 
the best order would occasion me, I must learn to 
taste purer in the perception that my position is 
every hour meliorated, and does already command 
those events I desire. That exult?ttion is only to 
be checked by the foresight of an order of things 
so excellent as to throw all our prosperities into 
the deepest shade. 

The face which character wears to me is self- 
sufficingness. I revere the person who is riches ; 
so that I cannot think of him as alone, or poor, or 
exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual pa- 
tron, benefactor, and beatified man. Character is 
centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or 
overset. A man should give us a sense of mass. 
Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraj)s, 
its conversation into ceremonies and escapes. But 
if I go to see an ingenious man I shall think my- 
self poorly entertained if he give me nimble pieces 
of benevolence and etiquette ; rather he shall stand 



CHARACTER. 99 

stoutly in his place and let me apprehend if it were 
only his resistance ; know that I have encountered 
a new and positive quality; — great refreshment 
for both of us. It is much that he does not accept 
the conventional opinions and practices. That non- 
conformity will remain a goad and remembrancer, 
and every inquirer will have to dispose of him, in 
the first place. There is nothing real or useful 
that is not a seat of war. Our houses -ring with 
laughter and personal and critical gossip, but it 
helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who 
is a problem and a threat to society, whom it can- 
not let pass in silence but must either worship or 
hate, — and to whom all parties feel related, both 
the leaders of opinion and the obscure and eccen- 
tric, — he helps ; he puts America and Europe in 
the wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, 
' man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 't is the best 
we can do,' by illuminating the untried and un- 
known. Acquiescence in the establishment and 
appeal to the public, indicate infirm faith, heads 
which are not clear, and which must see a house 
built, before they can comprehend the plan of it. 
The wise man not only leaves out of his thought 
the many, but leaves out the few. Fountains, the 
self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because 
he is commanded, the assured, the primary, — they 
are good ; for these announce the instant presence 
of supreme power. 



100 CHARACTER. 

Our action should rest mathematically on our 
substance. In nature there are no false valuations. 
A pound of water in the ocean - tempest has no 
more gravity than in a midsummer pond. All 
things work exactly according to their quality and 
according to their quantity ; attempt nothing they 
cannot do, except man only. He has pretension ; 
he wishes and attempts things beyond his force. I 
read in a book of English memoirs, " Mr. Fox 
(afterwards Lord Holland) said, he must have the 
Treasury ; he had served up to it, and would have 
it." XenoiDhon and his Ten Thousand were quite 
equal to what they attempted, and did it ; so equal, 
that it was not suspected to be a grand and inimita- 
ble exploit. Yet there stands that fact unrepeated, 
a high-Water mark in military history. Many have . 
attempted it since, and not been equal to it. It is 
only on reality that any power of action can be 
based. No institution will be better than the insti- 
tutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person 
who undertook a practical reform, yet I was never 
able to find in him the enterprise of love he took in 
hand. He adopted it by ear and by the under- 
standing from the books he had been reading. All 
his action was tentative, a piece of the city carried 
out into the fields, and was the city still, and no 
new fact, and could not inspire enthusiasm. Had 
there been something latent in the man, a terrible 



CHARACTER. 101 

iindemonst rated genius agitating and embarrassing 
his demeanor, we had watched for its advent. It 
is not enough that the intellect . should see the evils 
and their remedy. We shall still postpone our ex- 
istence, nor take the ground to which we are en- 
titled, whilst it is only a thought and not a spirit 
that ixicites us. We have not yet served up to it. 

These are properties of life, and another trait is 
the notice of incessant growth. Men should be in- 
telligent and earnest. They must also make us feel 
that they have a controlling happy future opening 
before them, v^diose early twilights already kindle 
in the passing hour. The hero is misconceived and 
misreported ; he cannot therefore wait to unravel 
any man's blunders ; he is again on his road, add- 
ing new powers and honors to his domain and new 
claims on your heart, which will bankrupt you if 
you have loitered about the old things and have not 
kept your relation to him by adding to your wealth. 
New actions are the only apologies and explana- 
tions of old ones which the noble can bear to offer 
or to receive. If your friend has displeased you, 
you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has 
already lost all memory of the passage, and has 
doubled his power to serve you, and ere you can 
rise up again will burden you with blessings. 

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevo- 
lence that is only measured by its works. Love is 



102 CHARACTER. 

inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its gran- 
ary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man, 
though he sleep, seems to purify the air and his 
house to adorn the landscape and strengthen the 
laws. People always recognize this difference. We 
know who is benevolent, by quite other means than 
the amount of subscription to soup-societies. It is 
only low merits that can be enumerated. Fear, 
when your friends say to you what you have done 
well, and say it through ; but when they stand with 
uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, 
and must suspend their judgment for years to come, 
you may begin to hope. Those who live to the fu- 
ture must always appear selfish to those who live to 
the present. Therefore it was droll in the good 
Riemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to 
make out a list of his donations and good deeds, as, 
so many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, 
to Tischbein ; a lucrative place found for Professor 
Voss, a post under the Grand Duke for Herder, 
a pension for Meyer, two professors recommended 
to foreign universities ; &c., &c. The longest list 
of specifications of benefit would look very short. 
A man is a poor creature if he is to be measured 
so. For all these of course are exceptions, and the 
rule and hodiernal life of a good man is benefac- 
tion. The true charity of Goethe is to be inferred 
from the account he gave Dr. Eckermann of the 



CHARACTER, 103 

way in whicli he had spent his fortune. " Each 
hon-mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. Half a 
million of my own money, the fortune I inherited, 
my salary and the large income derived from my 
writings for fifty years back, have been expended 
to instruct me in what I now know. I have besides 
seen," &c. 

I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to 
enumerate traits of this simple and rapid power, 
and we are painting the lightning with charcoal ; 
but in these long nights and vacations I like to 
console myself so. Nothing but itself can copy it. 
A word warm from the heart enriches me. I sur- 
render at discretion. How death-cold is literary 
genius before this fire of life! These are the 
touches that reanimate my heavy soul and give it 
eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I find, where 
I thought myself poor, there was I most rich. 
Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to be 
again rebuked by some new exhibition of charac- 
ter. Strange alternation of attraction and repul- 
sion! Character repudiates intellect, yet excites 
it ; and character passes into thought, is published 
so, and then is ashamed before new flashes of moral 
worth. 

Character is nature in the highest form. It is 
of no use to ape it or to contend with it. Some- 
what is possible of resistance, and of persistence, 



104 CHARACTER. 

and of creation, to tliis power, which will foil all 
emulation. 

This masterpiece is best where no hands but na- 
ture's have been laid on it. Care is taken that the 
greatly-destined shall slip up into life in the shade, 
with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch and blazon 
every new thought, every blushing emotion of young 
genius. Two persons lately, very young children 
of the most high God, have given me occasion for 
thought. When I explored the source of their 
sanctity and charm for the imagination, it seemed 
as if each answered, ' From my nonconformity ; I 
never listened to your people's law, or to what they 
call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was con- 
tent with the simple rural poverty of my own; 
hence this sweetness ; my work never reminds you 
of that ; — is pure of that.' And nature advertises 
me in such persons that in democratic America she 
will not be democratized. How cloistered and con- 
stitutionally sequestered from the market and from 
scandal ! It was only this morning that I sent 
away some wild flowers of these wood-gods. They 
are a relief from literature, — these fresh draughts 
from the sources of thought and sentiment ; as we 
read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first 
lines of written prose and verse of a nation. How 
captivating is their devotion to their favorite books, 
whether ^schylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, 



CHARACTER. 105 

as feeling that tliey have a stake in that book ; 
who touches that, touches them ; — and especially 
the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of 
thought from which he writes, in unconsciousness 
of any eyes that shall ever read this writing. 
Could they dream on still, as angels, and not wake 
to comparisons and to be flattered ! Yet some 
natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and 
wherever the vein of thought reaches down into 
the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Sol- 
emn friends will warn them of the danger of the 
head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, 
but they can afford to smile. I remember the in- 
dignation of an eloquent Methodist at the kind ad- 
monitions of a Doctor of Divinity, — ' My friend, 
a man can neither be praised nor insulted.' But 
forgive the counsels ; they are very natural. I 
remember the thought which occurred to me when 
some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to 
America, was. Have you been victimized in being 
brought hither ? — or, prior to that, answer me this, 
' Are you victimizable ? ' 

As I have said. Nature keeps these sovereignties 
in her own hands, and however pertly our sermons 
and disciplines would divide some share of credit, 
and teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she 
goes her own gait and puts the wisest in the wrong. 
She makes very light of gospels and prophets, as 



106 CHARACTER. 

one who has a great many more to produce and no 
excess of time to spare on any one. There is a class 
of men, individuals of which appear at long inter- 
vals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue 
that they have been unanimously saluted as divine., 
and who seem to be an accumulation of that power 
we consider. Divine persons are character born, 
or, to borrow a phrase from Napoleon, they are 
victory organized. They are usually received with 
ill-will, because they are new and because they set 
a bound to the exaggeration that has been made of 
the personality of the last divine person. Nature 
never rhymes her children, nor makes two men 
alike. When we see a great man we fancy a re- 
semblance to some historical person, and predict 
the sequel of his character and fortune ; a result 
which he is sure to disappoint. None will ever 
solve the problem of his character according to our 
prejudice, but only in his own high unprecedented 
way. Character wants room ; must not be crowded 
on by persons nor be judged from glimpses got 
in the press of affairs or on few occasions. It 
needs perspective, as a great building. It may not, 
probably does not, form relations rapidly ; and we 
should not require rash exj)lanation, either on the 
popular ethics, or on our own, of its action. 

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think 
the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and 



CHARACTER. 107 

blood. Every trait whicli the artist recorded in 
stone lie had seen in life, and better than his copy. 
We have seen many counterfeits, but we are born 
believers in great men. How easily we read in 
old books, when men were few, of the smallest 
action of the patriarchs. We require that a man 
should be so large and columnar in the landscape, 
that it should deserve to be recorded that he arose, 
and girded up his loins, and departed to such a 
place. The most credible pictures are those of 
majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and 
convinced the senses ; as happened to the eastern 
magian who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht 
or Zoroaster. When the Yuiiani sage arrived at 
Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a 
day on which the Mobeds of every country should 
assemble, and a golden chair was placed for the 
Yunaiii sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the 
prophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the as- 
sembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, 
" This form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but 
truth can proceed from them." Plato said it was 
impossible not to believe in the children of the 
gods, " though they should speak without probable 
or necessary arguments." I should think myself 
very unhappy in my associates if I could not credit 
the best things in history. " John Bradshaw," says 
Milton, " appears like a consul, from whom the 



108 CHARACTER. 

fasces are not to depart with the year ; so that not 
on the tribunal only, but throughout his life, you 
would regard him as sitting in judgment upon 
kings.'' I find it more credible, since it is anterior 
information, that one man should hnow heaven., as 
the Chinese say, than that so many men should 
know the world. " The virtuous prince confronts 
the gods, without any misgiving. He waits a hun- 
dred ages till a sage comes, a.nd does not doubt. 
He who confronts the gods, without any misgiving, 
knows heaven ; he who waits a hundred ages until 
a sage comes, without doubting, knows men. Hence 
the virtuous prince moves, and for ages shows em- 
pire the way." But there is no need to seek remote 
examples. He is a dull observer whose experience 
has not taught him the reality and force of magic, as 
well as of chemistry. The coldest precisian cannot 
go abroad without encountering inexplicable influ- 
ences. One man fastens an eye on him and the 
graves of the memory render up their dead ; the 
secrets that make him wretched either to keep or to 
betray must be yielded ; — another, and he cannot 
speak, and the bones of his body seem to lose their 
cartilages; the entrance of a friend adds grace, 
boldness, and eloquence to him ; and there are per- 
sons he cannot choose but remember, who gave a 
transcendent expansion to his thought, and kindled 
another life in his bosom. 



CHARACTER. 109 

What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, 
when tliey spring from this deep root ? The suf- 
ficient reply to the skeptic who doubts the power 
and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of 
joyful intercourse with persons, which makes the 
faith and practice of all reasonable men. I know 
nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the 
profound good understanding which can subsist, 
after much exchange of good offices, between two 
virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself and 
sure of his friend. It is a happiness which post- 
pones all other gratifications, and makes politics, 
and commerce, and churches, cheap. For when 
men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a 
shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with dee;ls, 
with accomplishments, it should be the festival of 
nature which all things announce. Of such friend- 
ship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all 
other things are symbols of love. Those relations 
to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned 
the romances of youth, become, in the progress of 
the character, the most solid enjoyment. 

If it were possible to live in right relations 
with men ! — if we could abstain from asking any- 
thing of them, from asking their praise, or help, or 
pity, and content us with compelling them through 
the virtue of the eldest laws ! Could we not deal 
with a few persons, — with one person, — after 



110 CHARACTER. 

the unwritten statutes, and make an experiment oi 
their efficacy ? Could we not pay our friend the 
compliment of truth, of silence, of forbearing? 
Need we be so eager to seek him ? If we are re- 
lated, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the an- 
cient world that no metamorphosis could hide a 
god from a god ; and there is a Greek verse which 
runs, — 

" Tlie Gods are to eacli other not unknown." 

Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity ; 
they gravitate to each other, and cannot other' 
wise : — - 

When each the other shall avoid, 
Shall each by each be most enjoyed. 

Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods 
must seat themselves without seneschal in our Olym- 
pus, and as they can instal themselves by seniority 
divine. Society is spoiled if pains are taken, if the 
associates are brought a mile to meet. And if it 
be not society, it is a mischievous, low, degrading 
jangle, though made up of the best. All the great- 
ness of each is kept back and every foible in pain- 
ful activity, as if the Olympians should meet to ex- 
change snuff-boxes. 

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying 
scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or com- 
mand behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a 



CHARACTER. Ill 

friend, we pause ; our heat and hurry look foolish 
enough ; now pause, now possession is required, and 
the power to swell the moment from the resources 
of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble rela- 
tions. 

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind; a 
friend is the hope of the heart. Our beatitude 
waits for the fulfilment of these two in one. The 
ages are opening this moral force. All force is the 
shadow or symbol of that. Poetry is joyful and 
strong as it draws its inspiration thence. Men 
write their names on the world as they are filled 
with this. History has been mean ; our nations 
have been mobs ; we have never seen a man : that 
divine form we do not yet know, but only the dream 
and prophecy of such : we do not know the majestic 
manners which belong to him, which appease and 
exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the 
most private is tiie most public energy, that quality 
atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts 
in the dark, and succors them who never saw it. 
What greatness has yet appeared is beginnings and 
encouragements to us in this direction. The history 
of those gods and saints which the world has writ- 
ten and then worshipped, are documents of charac- 
ter. The ages have exulted in the manners of a 
youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was 
hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the 



112 CHARACTER. 

pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendor 
around the facts of his death which has transfigured 
every particular into an universal symbol for the 
eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our 
highest fact. But the mind requires a victory to 
the senses ; a force of character which will convert 
judge, jury, soldier, and king ; which will rule ani- 
mal and mineral virtues, and blend with the courses 
of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and of moral 
agents. 

If we cannot attain at a bound to these gran- 
deurs, at least let us do them homage. In society, 
high advantages are set down to the possessor as 
disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in 
our private estimates. I do not forgive in my 
friends the failure to know a fine character and to 
entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at 
last that which we have always longed for is arrived 
and shines on us with glad rays out of that far ce- 
lestial land, then to be coarse, then to be critical 
and treat such a visitant with the jabber and sus- 
picion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that seems 
to shut the doors of heaven. This is confusion, this 
the right insanity, when the soul no longer knows 
its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are 
due. Is there any religion but this, to know that 
wherever in the wide desert of being the holy senti- 
ment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms 



CHARACTER. 113 

for me ? if none sees it, I see it ; I am aware, if I 
alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, 
I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my 
gloom and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged 
by the presence of this guest. There are many 
eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and 
household virtues ; there are many that can discern 
Genius on his starry track, though the mob is in- 
capable ; but when that love w^hich is all-suffering, 
all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to it- 
self that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this 
world sooner than soil its white hands by any com- 
pliances, comes into our streets and houses, — only 
the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the 
only compliment they can pay it is to own it. 



MANNERS. . 



" How near to good is what is fair ! 
Which we no sooner see, 
But with the lines and outward air 
Our senses taken be. 

Again yourselves compose, 
And now put all the aptness on 
Of Figure, that Proportion 

Or Color can disclose ; 
That if those silent arts were lost, 
Design and Picture, they might boast 

From you a newer ground. 
Instructed by the heightening sense 
Of dignity and reverence 

In their true motions found." 

Ben Jonson, 



IV. 

MANNEES. 



Half tlie world, it is said, knows not how the 
other haK live. Our Exploring Expedition saw 
the Feejee islanders getting their dinner off human 
bones; and they are said to eat their own wives 
and children. The husbandry of the modern in- 
habitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes) is 
philosoj)hical to a fault. To set up their house- 
keeping nothing is requisite but two or three 
earthen pots, a stone to grind meal, and a mat 
which is the bed. The house, namely a tomb, is 
ready without rent or taxes. No rain can pass 
through the roof, and there is no door, for there is 
no want of one, as there is nothing to lose. If the 
house do not please them, they walk out and enter 
another, as there are several hundreds at their 
command. "It is somewhat singular," adds Bel- 
zoni, to whom we owe this account, " to talk of 
happiness among people who live in sepulchres, 
among the corpses and rags of an ancient nation 
which they know nothing of." In the deserts of 



118 MANNERS. 

Borgoo the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like 
cliff-swallows, and tlie language of these negroes is 
compared by tlieir neighbors to the shrieking of 
bats and to the whistling of birds. Again, the Bor- 
noos have no proper names; individuals are called 
after their height, thickness, or other accidental 
quality, and have nicknames merely. But the salt, 
the dates, the ivory, and the gold, for which these 
horrible regions are visited, find their way into 
countries where the purchaser and consumer can 
hardly be ranked in one race with these cannibals 
and man-stealers ; countries where man serves him- 
self with metals, wood, stone, glass, gum, cotton, 
silk, and wool ; honors himself with architecture ; 
writes laws, and contrives to execute his will 
through the hands of many nations ; and, espe- 
cially, establishes a select society, running through 
all the countries of intelligent men, a self-consti- 
tuted aristocracy, or fraternity of the best, which, 
without written law or exact usage of any kind, 
perpetuates itself, colonizes every new-planted isl- 
and and adopts and makes its own whatever per- 
sonal beauty or extraordinary native endowment 
anywhere appears. 

What fact more conspicuous in modern history 
than the creation of the gentleman ? Chivalry is 
that, and loyalty is that, and, in English literature 
half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip 



BfANNERS. 119 

Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The 
word gentleman., which, like the word Christian, 
must hereafter characterize the present and the few 
preceding centuries by the importance attached to 
it, is a homage to personal and. incommunicable 
properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have 
got associated with the name, but the steady inter- 
est of mankind in it must be attributed to the valu- 
able properties which it designates. An element 
which unites all the most forcible persons of every 
country, makes them intelligible and agreeable to 
each other, and is somewhat so precise that it is at 
once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign, — 
cannot be any casual product, but must be an av- 
erage result of the character and faculties univer- 
sally found in men. It seems a certain permanent 
average ; as the atmosphere is a permanent compo- 
sition, whilst so many gases are combined only to 
be decompounded. Comnie ilfaut., is the French- 
man's description of good society : as we must he. 
It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of 
precisely that class who have most vigor, who take 
the lead in the world of this hour, and though far 
from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and 
highest tone of human feeling, it is as good as the 
whole society permits it to be. It is made of the 
spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is a 
compound result into which every great force en- 



120 MANNERS. 

i 

ters as an ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, 
wealth, and power. 

There is something equivocal in all the words in 
use to express the excellence of manners and so- 
cial cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional, 
and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the 
cause. The word gentleman has not any correla- 
tive abstract to express the quality. Gentility is 
mean, and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must 
keep alive in the vernacular the distinction hQ- 
tween fashion, a word of narrow and often sinister 
meaning, and the heroic character which the gentle- 
man imports. The usual words, however, must be 
respected ; they will be found to contain the root 
of the matter. The point of distinction in all this 
class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and 
the like, is that the flower and fruit, not the grain 
of the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which 
is the aim this time, and not worth. The result is 
now in question, although our words intimate well 
enough the popular feeling that the appearance 
supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of 
truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that 
lordship in his behavior ; not in any manner de- 
pendent and servile, either on persons, or opinions, 
or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real 
force, the word denotes good -nature or benevo- 
lence : manhood first, and then gentleness. The 



MANNERS. 121 

popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease 
and fortune ; but that is a natural result of per- 
sonal force and love, that they should possess and 
dispense the goods of the world. In times of 
violence, every eminent person must fall in with 
many opportunities to approve his stoutness and 
worth ; therefore every man's name that emerged 
at all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in 
our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal 
force never goes out of fashion. That is still par- 
amount to-day, and in the moving crowd of good 
society the men of valor and reality are known 
and rise to their natural place. The competition 
is transferred from war to politics and trade, but 
the personal force appears readily enough in these 
new arenas. 

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and 
in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise 
than talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts 
of gentlemen knock at the door ; but whenever 
used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name 
will be found to point at original energy. It de- 
scribes a man standing in his own right and work- 
ing after untaught methods. In a good lord there 
must first be a good animal, at least to the extent 
of yielding the incomparable advantage of animal 
spirits. The ruling class must have more, but 
they must have these, giving in every company the 



122 MANNERS. 

sense of power, which makes things easy to be 
done which daunt the wise. The society of the en- 
ergetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, 
is full of courage and of attempts which intimidate 
the pale scholar. The courage which girls exhibit 
is like a battle of Lundy's Lane, or a sea-fight. 
The intellect relies on memory to make some sup- 
plies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But 
memory is a base mendicant with basket and 
badge, in the presence of these sudden masters. 
The rulers of society must be up to the work of the 
world, and equal to their versatile office : men of 
the right Caesarian pattern, who have great range of 
affinity. I am far from believing the timid maxim 
of Lord Falkland ("that for ceremony there must 
go two to it ; since a bold fellow will go through 
the cunningest forms"), and am of opinion that 
the gentleman is the bold fellow whose forms are 
not to be broken through ; and only that plenteous 
nature is rightful master which is the complement 
of whatever person it converses with. My gentle- 
man gives the law where he is ; he will outpray 
saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, 
and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good 
company for pirates and good with academicians ; 
so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him ; 
he has the private entrance to all minds, and I 
could as easily exclude myself, as him. The fa^ 



MANNERS. 123 

mous gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of 
this strong type ; Saladiu, Sapor, the Cid, Julius 
Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordli- 
est personages. They sat very carelessly in their 
chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to value 
any condition at a high rate. 

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the 
popular judgment, to the completion of this man of 
the world ; and it is a material deputy which walks 
through the dance which the first has led. Money 
is not essential, but this wide affinity is, which tran- 
scends the habits of clique and caste and makes it- 
self felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat is 
only valid in fashionable circles and not with truck- 
men, he will never be a leader in fashion ; and if 
the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms 
with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall 
perceive that he is already really of his own or- 
der, he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, 
and Epaminondas, are gentlemen of the best blood 
who have chosen the condition of poverty when 
that of wealth was equally open to them. I use 
these old names, but the men I speak of are my 
contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every 
generation one of these well - appointed knights, 
but every collection of men furnishes some exam- 
ple of the class; and the politics of this country, 
and the trade of every town, are controlled by these 



124 MANNERS. 

hardy and irresponsible doers, who have inventioq 
to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts 
them in fellowship with crowds, and makes their 
action popular. 

The manners of this class are observed and 
caught v/ith devotion by men of taste. The asso- 
ciation of these masters with each other and with 
men intelligent of their merits, is mutually agreea- 
ble and stimulating. The good forms, the happiest 
expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. By 
swift consent everything superfluous is dropped, 
everything graceful is renewed. Fine manners 
show themselves formidable to the uncultivated 
man. They are a subtler science of defence to 
parry and intimidate ; but once matched by the 
skill of the other party, they drop the point of the 
sword, — points and fences disappear, and the youth 
finds himself in a more transparent atmosphere, 
wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a 
misunderstanding rises between the players. Man- 
ners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments 
and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our 
dealing and conversation as a railway aids travel- 
ling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of 
the road and leaving nothing to be conquered but 
pure space. These forms very soon become fixed, 
and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with the 
more heed that it becomes a badge of social and 



MANNERS. 125 

civil distinctions. Tlius grows up Fasliion, an 
equivocal semblance, the most puissant, tlie most 
fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and fol- 
lowed, and which morals and violence assault in 
vain. 

There exists a strict relation between the class of 
power and the exclusive and polished circles. The 
last are always filled or filling from the first. The 
strong men usually give some allowance even to 
the petulances of fashion, for that affinity they find 
in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, destroyer 
of the old noblesse, never ceased to court the Fau- 
bourg St. Germain ; doubtless with the feeling that 
fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, 
though in a strange way, represents all manly vir- 
tue. It is virtue gone to seed : it is a kind of post- 
humous honor. It does not often caress the great, 
but the children of the great : it is a hall of the 
Past. It usually sets its face against the great of 
this hoar. Great men are not commonly in its 
halls ; they are absent in the field : they are work- 
ing, not triumphing. Fashion is made up of their 
children ; of those who through the value and vir- 
tue of somebody, have acquired lustre to their name, 
marks of distinction, means of cultivation and gen- 
erosity, and in their physical organization a certain 
health and excellence which secure to them, if not 
the highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy. 



126 MANNERS. 

The class of power, tlie working heroes, the Cortez, 
the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the festiv- 
ity and permanent celebration of such as they ; that 
fashion is funded talent ; is Mexico, Marengo, and 
Trafalgar beaten out thin ; that the brilliant names 
of fashion run back to just such busy names as their 
own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, 
their sons shall be the reapers, and their sons, in 
the ordinary course of things, must yield the pos- 
session of the harvest to new competitors with 
keener eyes and stronger frames. The city is re- 
cruited from the country. In the year 1805, it is 
said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbe- 
cile. The city would have died out, rotted, and 
exploded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from 
the fields. It is only country which came to town 
day before yesterday that is city and court to-day. 

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable re- 
sults. These mutual selections are indestructible. 
If they provoke anger in the least favored class, 
and the excluded majority revenge themselves on 
the excluding minority by the strong hand and 
kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top, 
as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk : and 
if the people should destroy class after class, until 
two men only were left, one of these would be the 
leader and would be involuntarily served and cop- 
ied by the other. You may keep this n?inority out 



MANNERS. 127 

of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life, 
and is one of the estates of the reahii. I am the 
more struck with this tenacity, when I see its work. 
It respects the administration of such unimportant 
matters, that we shoukl not look for any durability 
in its rule. We sometimes meet men under some 
strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a 
religious movement, and feel that the moral senti- 
ment rules man and nature. We think all other 
distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive, this 
of caste or fashion for example ; yet come from 
year to year and see how permanent that is, in this 
Boston or New York life of man, where too it has 
not the least countenance from the law of the land. 
Not in Egy|3t or in India a firmer or more impas- 
sable line. Here are associations whose ties go 
over and under and through it, a meeting of mer- 
chants, a military corps, a college class, a fire-club, 
a professional association, a political, a religious 
convention ; — the persons seem to draw insepara- 
bly near; yet, that assembly once dispersed, its 
members will not in the year meet again. Each 
returns to his degree in the scale of good society, 
porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen. 
The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion 
may be objectless, but the nature of this union and 
selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental. 
Each man's rank in that perfect graduation de- 



128 MANNERS. 

pends on some symmetry in his structure or some 
agreement in his structure to the symmetry of so- 
ciety. Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natu- 
ral claim of their own kind. A natural gentleman 
finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician 
out who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion un- 
derstands itself ; good-breeding and personal supe- 
riority of whatever country readily fraternize with 
those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes 
have distinguished themselves in London and Paris 
by the purity of their tournure. 

To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on 
reality, and hates nothing so much as pretenders ; 
to exclude and mystify pretenders and send them 
into everlasting ' Coventry,' is its delight. We 
contemn in turn every other gift of men of the 
world; but the habit even in little and the least 
matters of not appealing to any but our own sense 
of propriety, constitutes the foundation of all chiv- 
alry. There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so 
it be sane and proportioned, which fashion does not 
occasionally adopt and give it the freedom of its 
saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if 
it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded 
ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some 
crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as 
long as his head is not giddy with the now circum- 
stance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in 



MANNERS. 129 

waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled 
in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the 
energy of the individual. The maiden at her first 
ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that 
there is a ritual according to whicl\ every act and 
compliment must be performed, or the failing party 
must be cast out of tliis presence. Later they learn 
that good sense and character make their own forms 
every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or 
refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with 
children on the floor, or stand on their head, or 
what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way ; and 
that strong will is always in fashion, let who will 
be unfashionable. All that fashion demands is 
composure and self-content. A circle of men per- 
fectly well-bred would be a company of sensible 
persons in which every man's native manners and 
character appeared. If the f ashionist have not this 
quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self- 
reliance that we excuse in a ma^n many sins if he 
vidll show us a complete satisfaction in his position, 
which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's 
good opinion. But any deference to some eminent 
man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege 
of nobility. He is an underling: I have nothing 
to do with him ; I will speak with his master. A 
man should not go where he cannot carry his whole 
sphere or society with him, — not bodily, the whole 



130 MANNERS. 

circle of Ms friends, but atmospherically. He 
should preserve in a new company the same atti- 
tude of mind and reality of relation which his daily 
associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best 
beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club. 
" If you could see Vich Ian Yohr with his tail on ! 
— — " But Vich Ian Yohr must always carry his 
belongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, 
then severed as disgrace. 

There will always be in society certain persons 
who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose 
glance will at any time determine for the curious 
their standing in the world. These are the cham- 
berlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness 
as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and 
allow them all their privilege. They are clear in 
their office, nor could they be thus formidable with- 
out their own merits. But do not measure the im- 
portance of this class by their pretension, or imag- 
ine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor and 
shame. They pass also at their just rate ; for how 
can they otherwise, in circles which exist as a sort 
of herald's office for the sifting of character? 

As the first thing man requires of man is reality, 
so that appears in all the forms of society. We 
pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to 
each other. Know you before all heaven and earth, 
that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory, — they 



MANNERS. 131 

look each other in the eye ; they grasp each other's 
hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is a 
great satisfaction. A gentleman never dodges; his 
eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other 
party, first of all, that he has been met.^ For what 
is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitali- 
ties ? Is it your draperies, pictures, and decora- 
tions ? Or do we not insatiably ask, Was a man 
in the house ? I may easily go into a great house- 
hold where there is much substance, excellent pro- 
vision for comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not 
encounter there any Amphitryon who shall subor- 
dinate these appendages. I may go into a cottage, 
and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I 
have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. It 
was therefore a very natural point of old feudal 
etiquette that a gentleman who received a visit, 
though it were of his sovereign, should not leave 
his roof, but shoidd wait his arrival at the door of 
his house. No house, though it were the Tuileries 
or the Escurial, is good for anything without a 
master. And yet we are not often gratified by this 
hospitality. Every body we know surrounds him- 
self with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gar- 
dens, equipage and all manner of toys, as screens 
to interpose between himself and his guest. Does 
it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive na- 
ture, and dreaded nothing so much as a full reu' 



132 MANNERS. 

contre front to front with liis fellow ? It were un- 
merciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these 
screens, which are of eminent convenience, whether 
the guest is too great or too little. We call to- 
gether many friends who keep each other in play, 
or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young 
people, and guard our retirement. Or if perchance 
a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose 
eye we have no care to stand, then again we run 
to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the 
voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal 
Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended him- 
self from the glances of Napoleon by an immense 
pair of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, 
and speedily managed to rally them off : and yet 
Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough, with 
eight hundred thousand troops at his back, to face 
a pair of f reeborn ej^es, but fenced himself with eti- 
quette and within triple barriers of reserve ; and, 
as all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was 
wont, when he fomid himself observed, to discharge 
his face of all expression. But emperors and rich 
men are by no means the most skilful masters of 
good manners. No rentroU nor army-list can dig- 
nify skulking and dissimulation ; and the first point 
of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the 
forms of good breeding point that way. 

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's trans- 



MANNERS. 133 

lation, Montaigne's account of Ms journey into 
Italy, and am struck witli nothing more agreeably 
than the self-respecting fashions of the time. His 
arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of 
France, is an event of some consequence. Wher- 
ever he goes he pays a visit to whatever prince or 
gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty 
to himself and to civilization. When he leaves any 
house in which he has lodged for a few weeks, he 
causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a per- 
petual sign to the house, as was the custom of gen- 
tlemen. 

The complement of this graceful self-respect, and 
that of all the points of good breeding I most re- 
quire and insist upon, is deference. I like that 
every chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I 
prefer a tendency to stateliness to an excess of fel- 
lowship. Let the incommunicable objects of nature 
and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us in- 
dependence. Let us not be too much acquainted. 
I would have a man enter his house through a hall 
filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he 
might not want the hint of tranquillity and self- 
poise. We should meet each morning as from for- 
eign countries, and, spending the day together, 
should depart at night, as into foreign countries. 
In all things I would have the island of a man in- 
violate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from 



134 MANNERS. 

peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of 
affection need invade tliis religion. This is myrrh 
and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers 
should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too 
much, all slides into confusion and meanness. It 
is easy to push this deference to a Chinese etiquette ; 
but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate 
fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise ; a 
lady is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at 
those invaders who fill a studious house with blast 
and running, to secure some paltry convenience. 
Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his 
neighbor's needs. Must we have a good understand- 
ing with one another's palates ? as foolish peoj^le 
who have lived long together know when each wants 
salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes 
for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for 
sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to 
hold out his plate as if I knew already. Every nat- 
ural function can be dignified by deliberation and 
privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The com- 
pliments and ceremonies of our breeding should re- 
call, however remotely, the grandeur of our destiny. 
The flower of courtesy does not very well bide 
handling, but if we dare to open another leaf and 
explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall 
find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders of 
men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart 



MANNERS. 185 

must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is 
usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too 
coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage 
and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good- 
breeding, a union of kindness and independence. 
We imperatively require a perception of, and a 
homage to beauty in our companions. Other vir- 
tues are in request in the field and workyard, but a 
certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those 
we sit with. I could better eat with one who did 
not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven 
and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the 
world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. 
The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if 
with less rigor, into all j)arts of life. The average 
spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting 
under certain limitations and to certain ends. It 
entertains every natural gift. Social in its nature, 
it respects everything which tends to unite men. It 
delights in measure. The love of beauty is mainly 
the love of measure or proportion. The person who 
screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses 
with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If 
you wish to be loved, love measure. You must 
have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will 
hide the want of measure. This perception comes 
in to polish and perfect the parts of the social in- 
strument. Society will pardon much to genius and 



136 MANNERS. 

special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, 
it loves what is conventional, or wliat belongs to 
coming together. That makes the good and bad of 
manners, namely what helps or hinders fellowship. 
For fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative ; 
not good sense private, but good sense entertaining 
company. It hates corners and sharp points of 
character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, 
and gloomy people ; hates whatever can interfere 
with total blending of parties ; whilst it values all 
peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, 
which can consist with good fellowship. And be- 
sides the general infusion of wit to heighten civil- 
ity, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever 
welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to 
its rule and its credit. 

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, 
but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will 
also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and 
quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick 
perceptions. One may be too punctual and too 
precise. He must leave the omniscience of busi- 
ness at the door, when he comes into the palace of 
beauty. Society loves Creole natures, and sleepy 
languishing manners, so that they cover sense, 
grace and good- will: the air of drowsy strength, 
which disarms criticism ; perhaps because such a 
person seems to reserve himself for the best of the 



MANNERS. 137 

game, and not spend himself on surfaces; an ignor- 
ing eye, which does not see the annoyances, shifts, 
and inconveniences that cloud the brow and smother 
the voice of the sensitive. 

Therefore besides personal force and so much 
perception as constitutes unerring taste, society de- 
mands in its patrician class another element al- 
ready intimated, which it significantly terms good- 
nature, — expressing all degrees of generosity, from 
the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige, up to 
the heights of magnanimity and love. Insight we 
must have, or we shall run against one another and 
miss the way to our food ; but intellect is selfish 
and barren. The secret of success in society is a 
certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is 
not happy in the company cannot find any word 
in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his 
information is a little impertinent. A man who is 
happy there, finds in every turn of the conversa- 
tion equally lucky occasions for the introduction of 
that which he has to say. The favorites of society, 
and what it calls lohole souls, are able men and of 
more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable 
egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the com- 
pany ; contented and contenting, at a marriage or a 
funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shoot- 
ing-match. England, which is rich in gentlemen, 
furnished, in the beginning of the present century. 



138 MANNERS. 

a good model of that genius which the world loves, 
in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the 
most social disposition and real love of men. Par- 
liamentary history has few better passages than the 
debate in which Burke and Fox separated in the 
House of Commons ; when Fox urged on his old 
friend the claims of old friendship with such ten- 
derness that the house was moved to tears. An- 
other anecdote is so close to my matter, that I must 
hazard the story. A tradesman who had long 
dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, 
found him one day counting gold, and demanded 
payment : — " No," said Fox, " I owe this money 
to Sheridan ; it is a debt of honor ; if an accident 
should happen to me, he has nothing to show." 
" Then," said the creditor, " I change my debt into 
a debt of honor," and tore the note in pieces. Fox 
thanked the man for his confidence and paid him, 
saying, " his debt was of older standing, and Sheri- 
dan must wait." Lover of liberty, friend of the 
Hindoo, friend of the African slave, he possessed a 
great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of 
him on the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, 
" Mr. Fox will always hold the first place in an 
assembly at the Tuileries." 

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of 
courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its 
foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to 



MANNERS. 139 

cast a species of derision on what we say. But I 
will neither be driven from some allowance to Fash- 
ion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief 
that love is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain 
that^ if we can ; but by all means we must affirm 
this. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp 
contrasts. Fashion, which affects to be honor, is 
often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom-code. 
Yet so long as it is the highest circle in the imagi- 
nation of the best heads on the planet, there is 
something necessary and excellent in it ; for it is 
not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the 
dupes of anything preposterous ; and the respect 
which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and 
sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which de- 
tails of high life are read, betray the universality 
of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a 
comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter 
the acknowledged ' first circles ' and apply these 
terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit to 
the individuals actually found there. Monarchs 
and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not. 
Fashion has many classes and many rules of proba- 
tion and admission, and not the best alone. There 
is not only the right of conquest, which genius pre- 
tends, — the individual demonstrating his natural 
aristocracy best of the best ; — but less claims will 
pass for the time; for Fashion loves lions, and 



140 ' MANNERS. 

points like Circe to her horned company. This 
gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark ; 
and that is my Lord Ride, who cp^me yesterday 
from Bagdat ; here is Captain Friese, from Cape 
Turnagain ; and Captain Symmes, from the inte- 
rior of the earth ; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came 
down this morning in a balloon ; Mr. Hobnail, the 
reformer ; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has con- 
verted the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school ; 
and Signer Torre del Greco, who extinguished Ve- 
suvius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples ; Spahi, 
the Persian ambassador ; and Tul Wil Shan, the 
exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new 
moon. — But these are monsters of one day, and 
to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and 
dens ; for in these rooms every chair is waited for. 
The artist, the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, 
win their way up into these places and get repre- 
sented here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. 
Another mode is to pass through all the degrees, 
spending a year and a day in St. Michael's Square, 
being steeped in Cologne water, and perfumed, and 
dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in 
all the biography and politics and anecdotes of the 
boudoirs. 

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let 
there be grotesque sculpture about the gates and 
offices of temples. Let the creed and command- 



MANNERS. 141 

ments even have the saucy homage of parody. The 
forms of politeness universally express benevolence 
in superlative degrees. What if they are in the 
mouths of selfish men, and used as means of self- 
ishness ? What if the false gentleman almost 
bows the true out of the world ? What if the false 
gentleman contrives so to address his companion 
as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, 
and also to make them feel excluded ? Real ser- 
vice will not lose its nobleness. All generosity is 
not merely French and sentimental ; nor is it to 
be concealed that living blood and a passion of 
kindness does at last distinguish God's gentleman 
from Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout 
is not wholly unintelligible to the present age : 
" Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend 
and persuaded his enemy : what his mouth ate, his 
hand paid for : what his servants robbed, he re- 
stored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he sup- 
ported her in pain : he never forgot his children ; 
and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his 
whole body." Even the line of heroes is not ut- 
terly extinct. There is still ever some admirable 
person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who 
jumps in to rescue a drowning man ; there is still 
some absurd inventor of charities ; some guide and 
comforter of runaway slaves ; some friend of Po- 
land ; some Philhellene ; some fanatic who plants 



142 MANNERS, 

shade-trees for the second and third generation, 
and orchards when he is grown old 5 some well-con- 
cealed piety ; some just man happy in an ill fame ; 
some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune and 
impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And 
these are the centres of society, on which it returns 
for fresh impulses. These are the creators of 
Fashion, which is an attempt to organize beauty 
of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, 
in the theory, the doctors and apostles of this 
church : Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sid- 
ney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant 
heart who worshipped Beauty by word and by 
deed. The persons who constitute the natural 
aristocracy are not found in the actual aristocracy, 
or only on its edge ; as the chemical energy of the 
spectrum is foimd to be greatest just outside of the 
spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the senes- 
chals, who do not know their sovereign when he 
appears. The theory of society supposes the exist- 
ence and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off 
their coming. It says with the elder gods, — 

" As Heaven and Earth are fairer far 
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; 
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth, 
In form and shape compact and beautiful; 
So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads; 
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us, 



MANNERS. 143 

And fated to excel us, as we pass 
lu glory that old Darkness: 

for, 't is the eternal law, 

That first in beauty shall be first in might." 

Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good so- 
ciety there is a narrower and higher circle, concen- 
tration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which 
there is always a tacit appeal of pricle and refer- 
ence, as to its inner and imperial court ; the parlia- 
ment of love and chivalry. And this is constituted 
of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are 
native ; with the love of beauty, the delight in so- 
ciety, and the power to embellish the passing day. 
If the individuals who compose the purest circles of 
aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of cen- 
turies, should pass in review, in such manner as 
that we could at leisure and critically inspect their 
behavior, we might find no gentleman and no lady; 
for although excellent specimens of courtesy and 
high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, 
in the particulars we should detect offence. Be- 
cause elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. 
There must be romance of character, or the most 
fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. 
It must be genius which takes that direction: it 
must be not courteous, but courtesy. High be- 
havior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is 
praised for the fidelity with which he painted the 



144 MANNERS, 

demeanor and conversation of the superior classes. 
Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great la- 
dies, liad some right to comjjlain of tlie absurdity 
that had been put in their mouths before the days 
of Waverley; but neither does Scott's dialogue 
bear criticism. His lords brave each other in 
smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is 
in costume, and does not please on the second 
reading : it is not warm with life. In Shakspeare 
alone the speakers do not strut and bridle, the dia- 
logue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles 
that of being the best-bred man in England and 
in Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we 
are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, 
in the presence of a man or woman who have no 
bar in their nature, but whose character emanates 
freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful 
form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful 
behavior is better than a beautiful form : it gives 
a higher pleasure than statues or pictures ; it is the 
finest of the fine arts. A man is but a little thing 
in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the 
moral quality radiating from his countenance he 
may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and 
in his manners equal the majesty of the world. I 
have seen an individual whose manners, though 
wholly within the conventions of elegant society, 
were never learned there, but were orimnal and 



MANNERS. 145 

commanding and held out protection and prosper- 
ity ; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, 
but carried the holiday in his eye; who exhilarated 
the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes 
of existence; who shook off the captivity of eti- 
quette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured 
and free as Robin Hood ; yet with the port of an 
emperor, if need be, — cahn, serious, and fit to 
stand the gaze of millions. 

The open air and the fields, the street and pub- 
lie chambers are the places where Man executes his 
will ; let him yield or divide the sceptre at the door 
of the house. Woman, with her instinct of behav- 
ior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any 
coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of 
that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment 
which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. 
Our American institutions have been friendly to 
her, and at this moment I esteem it a chief felicity 
of this country, that it excels in women. A cer- 
tain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the 
men may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of 
Woman's Eights. Certainly let her be as much 
better placed in the laws and in social forms as the 
most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so en- 
tirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that I 
believe only herself can show us how she shall be 
served. The wonderful generosity of her senti- 

YOL. III. 10 



146 MANNERS. 

ments raises her at times into heroical and godlike 
regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, 
or Polymnia; and by the firmness with which she 
treads her upward path, she convinces the coarsest 
calculators that another road exists than that which 
their feet know. But besides those who make 
good in our imagination the place of muses and of 
Delphic Sibyls, are there not women who fill our 
vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the 
wine runs over and fills the house with perfume ; 
who inspire us with courtesy ; who unloose our 
tongues and we speak; who anoint our eyes and 
we see ? We say things we never thought to have 
said; for once, our walls of habitual reserve van- 
ished and left us at large ; we were children play- 
ing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep 
us, we cried, in these influences, for days, for 
weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and will write 
out in many-colored words the romance that you 
are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his 
Persian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and as- 
tonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her 
day after day radiating, every instant, redundant 
joy and grace on all around her ? She was a sol- 
vent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous per- 
sons into one society : like air or water, an element 
of such a great range of affinities that it combines 
readily with a thousand substances. Where she is 



MANNERS. 147 

present all others will be more than they are wont. 
She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she 
did, became her. She had too much sympathy and 
desire to please, than that you could say her man- 
ners were marked with dignity, yet no princess 
eould surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each 
occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, 
nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems 
of the seven seemed to be written upon her. For 
though the bias of her nature v^^as not to thought, 
but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own 
nature as to meet intellectual persons by the ful- 
ness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments ; 
believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with 
all, all would show themselves noble. 

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or 
Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to 
those who look at the contemporary facts for sci- 
ence or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant 
to all spectators. The constitution of our society 
makes it a giant's castle to the ambitious youth 
who have not found their names enrolled in its 
Golden Book, and whom it has excluded from its 
coveted honors and privileges. They have yet to 
learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy and rel- 
ative : it is great by their allowance ; its proudest 
gates will fly open at the approach of their courage 



148 MANNERS. 

and virtue. For the present distress, however, of 
those who are predisposed to suffer from the tyr- 
annies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To 
remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most 
four, will commonly relieve the most extreme sus- 
ceptibility. For the advantages which fashion val- 
ues are plants which thrive in very confined locali- 
ties, in a few streets namely. Out of this precinct 
they go for nothing ; are of no use in the farm, in 
the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial so- 
ciety, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in 
friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue. 

But we have lingered long enough in these 
painted courts. The worth of the thing signified 
must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Every- 
thing that is called fashion and courtesy hum- 
bles itself before the cause and fountain of honor, 
creator of titles and dignities, namely the heart 
of love. This is the royal blood, this the fire, 
which, in all countries and contingencies, will work 
after its kind and conquer and expand all that 
approaches it. This gives new meanings to every 
fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no gran- 
deur but its own. What is rich ? Are you rich 
enough to help anybody ? to succor the unfashion- 
able and the eccentric? rich enough to make the 
Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his con- 
sul's paper which commends him " To the chari- 



MANNERS. 149 

table," the swarthy Italian with his few broken 
words of English, the lame pauper hunted by over- 
seers from town to town, even the poor insane or 
besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the noble ex- 
ception of your presence and your house from the 
general bleakness and stoniness ; to make such feel 
that they were greeted with a voice which made 
them both remember and hope ? What is vulgar 
but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive 
reasons ? What is gentle, but to allow it, and give 
their heart and yours one holiday from the national 
caution ? Without the rich heart, wealth is an 
ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could not afford 
to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt 
at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad and 
deep that although his speech was so bold and free 
with the Koran as to disgust all the dervishes, yet 
was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane 
man, some fool who had cut off his beard, or who 
had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet mad- 
ness in his brain, but fled at once to him ; that great 
heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the cen- 
tre of the country, that it seemed as if the instinct 
of all sufferers drew them to his side. And the 
madness which he harbored he did not share. Is 
not this to be rich ? this only to be rightly rich ? 

But I shall hear without pain that I play the 
courtier very iU, and talk of that which I do not 



150 MANNERS. 

well understand. It is easy to see that what is 
called by distinction society and fashion has good 
laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary, 
and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, 
and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tra- 
dition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to 
settle its character. ' I overheard Jove, one day,' 
said Silenus, ' talking of destroying the earth ; he 
said it had failed ; they were all rogues and vixens, 
who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days 
succeeded each other. Minerva said she hoped not ; 
they were only ridiculous little creatures, with this 
odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeter- 
minate aspect, seen far or seen near ; if you called 
them bad, they would appear so; if you called 
them good, they would appear so ; and there was 
no one person or action among them which would 
not puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, to 
know whether it was fundamentally bad or good.' 



GIFTS. 



Gifts of one who loved me, -=> 
'T was high time they came ; 
When he ceased to love me, 
Time they stopped for shame. 



V. 

GIFTS. 



It is said that the world is in a state of bank- 
ruptcy; that the world owes the world more than 
the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery 
and be sold. I do not think this general insolvency, 
which involves in some sort all the population, to 
be the reason of the difficulty experienced at Christ- 
mas and New Year and other times, in bestowing 
gifts ; since it is always so pleasant to be generous, 
though very vexatious to pay debts. But the im- 
pediment lies in the choosing. If at any time it 
comes into my head that a present is due from me 
to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the 
opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are al- 
ways fit presents ; flowers, because they are a proud 
assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the 
utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast 
with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary 
nature : they are like music heard out of a work- 
house. Nature does not cocker us ; we are chil- 
dren, not pets ; she is not fond ; everything is 



154 GIFTS. 

dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe uni- 
versal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like 
the frolic and interference of love and beauty. 
Men use to tell us that we love flattery even though 
we are not deceived by it, because it shows that 
we are of importance enough to be courted. Some- 
thing like that pleasure, the flowers give us : what 
am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed ? 
Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the 
flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic val- 
ues being attached to them. If a man should send 
to me to come a hundred miles to visit him and 
should set before me a basket of fine summer-fruit, 
I should think there was some proportion between 
the labor and the reward. 

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences 
and beauty every day, and one is glad when an im- 
perative leaves him no option ; since if the man at 
the door have no shoes, you have not to consider 
whether you could procure him a paint-box. And 
as it is always pleasing to see a man eat bread, or 
drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it 
is always a. great satisfaction to supply these first 
wants. Necessity does everything well. In our con- 
dition of universal dependence it seems heroic to 
let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and 
to give all that is asked, though at great inconven- 
ience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to 



GIFTS. 155 

leave to others the office of punishing him. I can 
think of many parts I should prefer playing to that 
of the Furies. Next to things of necessity, the 
rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, 
is that we might convey to some person that which 
properly belonged to his character, and was easily 
associated with him in thought. But our tokens 
of compliment and love are for the most part bar- 
barous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but 
apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of 
thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the 
poet brings his poem ; the shepherd, his lamb ; the 
farmer, corn ; the miner, a gem ; the sailor, coral 
and shells ; the painter, his picture ; the girl, a 
handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and 
pleasing, for it restores society in so far to the pri- 
mary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed 
in his gift, and every man's wealth is an index of 
his merit. But it is a cold lifeless business when 
you go to the shops to buy me something which 
does not represent your life and talent, but a gold- 
smith's. This is fit for kings, and rich men who 
represent kings, and a false state of property, to 
make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind 
of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black- 
mail. 

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which 
requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not 



156 GIFTS. 

the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you 
give tliem ? We wish to be self -sustained. We do 
not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us 
is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive 
anything from love, for that is a way of receiving 
it from ourselves ; but not from any one who as- 
sumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat 
which we eat, because there seems something of de- 
grading dependence in living by it : — 

" Brother, if Jove to thee a present make, 
Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take." 

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. 
We arraign society if it do not give us, besides 
earth and fire and water, opportunity, love, rever- 
ence, and objects of veneration. 

He is a good man who can receive a gift well. 
We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both 
emotions are unbecoming. Some violence I think 
is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or 
grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence 
is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do 
not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported ; 
and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should 
be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, 
and see that I love his commodity, and not him. 
The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the 
giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto 



GIFTS. 157 

him. When the waters are at level, then my goods 
pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all 
mine his. I say to him. How can you give me this 
pot of oil or this flagon of wine when all your oil 
and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift 
seems to deny ? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not 
useful things, for gifts. This giving is flat usurpa- 
tion, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrate- 
ful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all 
considering the value of the gift but looking back 
to the greater store it was taken from, — I rather 
sympatliize with the beneficiary than with the anger 
of my lord Timon. For the expectation of gratitude 
is mean, and is continually punished by the total in- 
sensibility of the obliged person. It is a great hap- 
piness to get off without injury and heart-burning 
from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by 
you. It is a very onerous business, this of being 
served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you 
a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that 
which I so admire in the Buddhist, who never 
thanks, and who says, " Do not flatter your bene- 
factors." 

The reason of these discords I conceive to be that 
there is no commensurability between a man and 
any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnani- 
mous person. After you have served him he at 
once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The 



158 GIFTS. 

service a man renders his friend is trivial and self- 
ish compared with the service he knows his friend 
stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had 
begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared 
with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is 
in my power to render him seems small. Besides, 
our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so 
incidental and at random that we can seldom hear 
the acknowledgments of any person who would 
thank us for a benefit, without some shame and 
humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, 
but must be content with an oblique one ; we sel- 
dom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct bene- 
fit which is directly received. But rectitude scat- 
ters favors on every side without knowing it, and 
receives with wonder the thanks of all people. 

I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty 
of love, which is the genius and god of gifts, and to 
whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him 
give kingdoms or flower-ieaves indifferently. There 
are persons from whom w^ always expect fairy- 
tokens ; let us not cease to expect theip. This is 
prerogative, and not to be limited by our municipal 
rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be 
bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of 
generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. I find 
that I am not much to you ; you ao not need me ; 
you do not feel me ; then am I thrust out of doors, 



GIFTS. 159 

though you proffer me house and lands. No ser- 
vices are of any value, but only likeness. When T 
have attempted to join myself to others by services, 
it proved an intellectual trick, — no more. They 
eat your service like apples, and leave you out. 
But love them, and they feel you and delight in 
you all the time. 



NATURE. 



The rounded world is fair to see, 

Nine times folded in mystery : 

Though baffled seers cannot impart 

The secret of its laboring heart, 

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast. 

And all is clear from east to west. 

Spirit that lurks each form within 

Beckons to spirit of its kin ; 

Self-kindled every atom glows, 

And hints the future which it owes. 



VI. 
NATURE. 



There are days which occur in this climate, at 
almost any season of the year, wherein the world 
reaches its perfection ; when the air, the heavenly 
bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature 
would indulge her offspring ; when, in these bleak 
upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that 
we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we 
bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba ; 
when everything that has life gives sign of satis- 
faction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem 
to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcy- 
ons may be looked for with a little more assurance 
in that pure October weather which we distinguish 
by the name of the Indian summer. The day, im- 
measurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and 
warni wide fields. To have lived through all its 
sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The soli- 
tary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates 
of the forest, the surprised man of the world is 
forced to leave his city estimates of great and 



164 NATURE. 

small, wise and foolish. Tlie knapsack of custom 
falls off his back with the first step he takes into 
these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames 
our religions, and reality which discredits our he- 
roes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance 
which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges 
like a god all men that come to her. We have 
crept out of our close and crowded houses into 
the night and morning, and we see what majes- 
tic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How 
willingly we would escape the barriers which ren- 
der them comparatively impotent, escape the so- 
phistication and second thought, and suffer nature 
to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods 
is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and 
heroic. The anciently - reported spells of these 
places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, 
and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. 
The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to 
live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. 
Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated 
on the divine sky and the immortal year. How 
easily we might walk onward into the opening land- 
scape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts 
fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the rec- 
ollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all 
memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, 
and we were led in triumph by nature. 



NATURE. 165 

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober 
and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and 
native to us. We come to our own, and make 
friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter 
of the schools would persuade us to despise. We 
never can part with it ; the mind loves its old home : 
as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to 
our eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water ; it 
is cold flame ; what health, what affinity ! Ever 
an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother 
when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in 
this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, 
and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give 
not the human senses room enough. We go out 
daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, 
and require so much scope, just as we need water 
for our bath. There are all degrees of natural in- 
fluence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up 
to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the im- 
agination and the soul. There is the bucket of 
cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which 
the chilled traveller rushes for safety, — and there 
is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We 
nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites 
from her roots and grains, and we receive glances 
from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude 
and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith 
is the point in which romance and reality meet. I 



166 NATURE. 

think if we should be rapt away into all that we 
dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel 
and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would 
remain of our furniture. 

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in 
which we have given heed to some natural object. 
The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to 
each crystal its perfect form ; the blowing of sleet 
over a wide sheet of water, and over plains ; the 
waving ryefield ; the mimic waving of acres of 
houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and 
ripple before the eye ; the reflections of trees and 
flowers in glassy lakes ; the musical steaming odor- 
ous south wind, which converts all trees to wind- 
harps ; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in 
the flames, or of pine logs, which yield glory to the 
walls and faces in the sittingroom, — these are the 
music and pictures of the most ancient religion. 
My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, 
and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my 
friend to the shore of our little river, and with one 
stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and 
personalities, yes, and the world of villages and 
personalities, behind, and pass into a delicate realm 
of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spot- 
ted man to enter without novitiate and probation. 
We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty ; we 
dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes 



NATURE. 167 

are bathed in these lights and forms. A holi- 
day, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, 
most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, 
power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, estab- 
lishes itself on the instant. These, sunset clouds, 
these delicately emerging stars, with their private 
and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I 
am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugli- 
ness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have 
early learned that they must work as enhancement 
and sequel to this original beauty. I am overin- 
structed for my return. Henceforth I shall be 
hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am 
grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no 
longer live without elegance, but a countryman 
shall be my master of revels. He who knows the 
most ; he who knows what sweets and virtues are 
in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, 
and how to come at these enchantments, — is the 
rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of 
the world have called in nature to their aid, can 
they reach the height of magnificence. This is the 
meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden- 
houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back their 
faulty personality with these strong accessories. I 
do not wonder that the landed interest should be 
invincible in the State with these dangerous auxib 
iaries. These bribe and invite ; not kings, not pal- 



168 NATURE. 

aces, not men, not women, but these tender and 
poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard 
what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his 
grove, his wine and his company, but the provoca- 
tion and point of the invitation came out of these 
beguiling stars. In their soft glances I see what 
men strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, 
or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of 
the horizon and the blue sky for the background 
which save all our works of art, which were other- 
wise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with ser- 
vility and obsequiousness, they should consider the 
effect of men reputed to be the possessors of nature, 
on imaginative minds. Ah I if the rich were rich 
as the poor fancy riches ! A boy hears a military 
band play on the field at night, and he has kings 
and queens and famous chivalry palpably before 
him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill coun- 
try, in the Notch Mountains, for examj)le, which 
converts the mountains into an ^olian harp, — 
and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the 
Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine 
hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note be so 
lofty, so haughtily beautiful ! To the poor young 
poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society ; he is 
loyal ; he respects the rich ; they are rich for the 
sake of his imagination ; how poor his fancy would 
be, if they were not rich ! That they have some 



NATURE. 169 

high-fenced grove which they call a park ; that 
they live in larger and better-garnished saloons 
than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only 
the society of the elegant, to watering-places and to 
distant cities, — these make the groundwork from 
which he has delineated estates of romance, com- 
pared with which their actual possessions are shan- 
ties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her 
son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born 
beauty by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, 
and forests that skirt the road, — a certain haughty 
favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a 
kind, of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power 
of the air. 

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and 
Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but the 
material landscape is never far off. We can find 
these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, 
or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises 
of local scenery. In every landscape the point of 
astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the 
earth, and that is seen from the first hillock 
as well as from the top of the AUeghanies. The 
stars at night stoop down over the brownest, home- 
liest common with all the spiritual magnificence 
which they shed on the Campagna, or on the mar- 
ble deserts of Egypt. The uproUed clouds and the 
colors of morning and evening will transfigure 



170 NATURE. 

maples and alders. The difference between land- 
scape and landscape is small, but there is great 
difference in the beholders. There is nothing so 
wonderful in any particular landscape as the neces- 
sity of being beautiful under which every landscape 
lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beau- 
ty breaks in everywhere. 

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of 
readers on this topic, which schoolmen called natura 
naturata^ or nature passive. One can hardly speak 
directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach 
in mixed companies what is called " the subject of 
religion." A susceptible person does not like to in- 
dulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of 
some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or 
to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral 
from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece 
or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have 
a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren 
and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than 
his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunt- 
ers and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose 
that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians 
should furnish facts for, would take place in the 
most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the "Wreaths" 
and " Flora's chaplets " of the bookshops ; yet or- 
dinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a 
topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin 



NATURE. 171 

to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Fri- 
volity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to 
be represented in the mythology as the most con- 
tinent of gods. I would not be frivolous before 
the admirable reserve and prudence. of time, yet I 
cannot renounce the right of returning often to this 
old topic. The multitude of false churches accred- 
its the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are 
the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, con- 
cerning which no sane man can affect an indiffer- 
ence or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is 
best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, 
or rather because there is no citizen. The sunset 
is unlike anything that is underneath it : it wants 
men. And the beauty of nature must always seem 
unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human 
figures that are as good as itself. If there were 
good men, there would never be this rapture in na- 
ture. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at 
the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is 
filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from 
the people to find relief in the majestic men that 
are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. 
The critics who complain of the sickly separation 
of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, 
must consider that our hunting of the picturesque 
is inseparable from our protest against false society. 
Man is fallen ; nature is erect, and serves as a 



172 NATURE. 

differential thermometer, detecting the presence or 
absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault 
of our dulness and selfishness we are looking up to 
nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will 
look up to us. We see the foaming brook with 
compunction : if our own life flowed with the right 
energy, we should shame the brook. The stream of 
zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex 
rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly 
studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes 
astrology ; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to 
show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy 
and physiology become phrenology and palmistry. 

But taking timely warning, and leaving many 
things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit 
our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura natu- 
rans, the quick cause before which all forms flee as 
the driven snows ; itself secret, its works driven 
before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancients 
represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in 
undescribable variety. It publishes itself in crea- 
tures, reaching from particles and spiculse through 
transformation on transformation to the highest 
symmetries, arriving at consummate results without 
a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little mo- 
tion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white 
and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific 
tropical climates. All changes pass without vio- 



NATURE. 173 

lence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of 
boundless space and boundless time. Geology has 
initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught 
us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange 
our Mosaic and Ptolemaic scheme* for her large 
style. We knew nothing rightly, for want of per- 
spective. Now we learn what patient periods must 
round themselves before the rock is formed; then 
before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race 
has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into 
soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, 
Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come iuc How far 
off yet is the trilobite ! how far the quadruped ! 
how inconceivably remote is man ! All duly arrive, 
and then race after race of men. It is a long way 
from granite to the oyster ; farther yet to Plato and 
the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet 
all must come, as surely as the first atom* has two 
sides. 

Motion or change and identity or rest are the 
first and second secrets of nature : — Motion and 
Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written 
on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The 
whirling bubble on the surface of a brook admits 
us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every 
shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water 
made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of 
the simpler shells ; the addition of matter from 



174 NATURE. 

year to year arrives at last at the most complex 
forms ; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, 
that from the beginning to the end of the universe 
she has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its two 
ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Com- 
pound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, 
man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same prop- 
erties. "^ 

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns 
to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, 
and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips 
an animal to find its place and living in the earth, 
and at the same time she arms and equips another 
animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide crea- 
tures ; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few 
feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. The 
direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes 
back for materials and begins again with the first 
elements on the most advanced stage : otherwise all 
goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to 
catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are 
the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor ; 
but they grope ever upward towards consciousness ; 
the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan 
their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The 
animal is the novice and probationer of a more 
advanced order. The men, though young, having 
tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are 




NATURE. 175 

already dissipated : the maples and ferns are still 
uncorrupt ; yet no doubt wlien they come to con- 
sciousness they too will curse and swear. Flowers 
so strictly belong to youth that we adult men soon 
come to feel that their beautiful generations con- 
cern not us : we have had our day ; now let the 
children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we 
are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness. 

Things are so strictly related, that according to 
the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts 
and properties of any other may be predicted. If 
we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city 
wall would certify us of the necessity that man 
must exist, as readily as the city. That identity 
makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great in- 
tervals on our customary scale. We talk of devia- 
tions from natural life, as if artificial life were not 
also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the 
boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude 
and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its 
own ends, and is directly related, there amid es- 
sences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh mountain- 
chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider 
how much we are nature's, we need not be supersti- 
tious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force 
did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Na- 
ture, who made the mason, made the house. We 
Tnay easily hear too much of rural influences. The 



176 NATURE. 

cool disengaged air of natural objects makes them 
enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with 
red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as 
they if we camp out and eat roots ; but let us be 
men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the 
elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs 
of ivory on carpets of silk. 

This guiding identity runs through all the sur- 
prises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes 
every law. Man carries the world in his head, the 
whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a 
thought. Because the history of nature is charac- 
tered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and 
discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in 
natural science was divined by the presentiment of 
somebody, before it was actually verified. A man 
does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which 
bind the farthest regions of nature : moon, plant, 
gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. 
Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the 
fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The 
common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and 
Black, is the same common sense which made the 
arrangements which now it discovers. 

If the identity expresses organized rest, the coun- 
ter action runs also into organization. The astron- 
omers said, ' Give us matter and a little motion and 
we will construct the universe. It is not enough 



NATURE. 177 

that we should have matter, we must also have 
a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and 
generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centrip- 
etal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, 
and we can show how all this mighty order grew.' 
— ' A very unreasonable postulate, ' said the meta- 
physicians, 'and a plain begging of the question. 
Could you not prevail to know the genesis of pro- 
jection, as well as the continuation of it ? ' Nature, 
meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, 
right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls 
rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the 
astronomers were right in making much of it, for 
there is no end to the consequences of the act. That 
famous aboriginal push propagates itself through 
all the balls of the system, and through every atom 
of every ball ; through all the races of creatures, 
and through the history and performances of every 
individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. 
Nature sends no creature, no man into the world 
without adding a small excess of his proper quality. 
Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the 
impulse ; so to every creature nature added a little 
violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to 
put it on its way ; in every instance a slight gen- 
erosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the 
air would rot, and without this violence of direc- 
tion which men and women have, without a spice of 

VOL. III. 12 



1T8 NATURE. 

bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We 
aim above the mark to hit the mark. Every act 
hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And 
when now and then comes along some sad, sharp- 
eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, 
and refuses to play but blabs the secret ; — how 
then? Is the bird flown? O no, the wary Na- 
ture sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier 
youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold 
them fast to their several aim ; makes them a little 
wrong-headed in that direction in which they are 
Tightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, 
for a generation or two more. The child with his 
sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by 
every sight and sound, without any power to com- 
pare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle 
or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a ginger- 
bread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing 
nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down 
at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day 
of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Na- 
ture has answered her purpose with the curly, dim- 
pled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has 
secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame 
by all these attitudes and exertions, — an end of the 
first importance, which could not be trusted to any 
care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this 
opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to 



NATURE. 179 

his eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to 
his good. We are made alive and kept alive by 
the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please," 
we do not eat for the good of living, but because 
the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The 
vegetable life does not content itself with casting 
from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills 
the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, 
if thousands perish, thousands may plant them- 
selves ; that hundreds may come up, that tens may 
live to maturity ; that at least one may replace the 
parent. All things betray the same calculated pro- 
fusion. The excess of fear with which the animal 
frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, start- 
ing at sight of a snake or at a sudden noise, pro- 
tects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, 
from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks 
in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with 
no prospective end ; and nature hides in his happi- 
ness her own end, namely progeny, or the perpe- 
tuity of the race. 

But the craft with which the world is made, runs 
also into the mind and character of men. No man 
is quite sane ; each has a vein of folly in his com- 
position, a slight determination of blood to the head, 
to make sure of holding him hard to some one point 
which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are 
never tried on their merits ; but the cause is re- 



180 NATURE. 

duced to particulars to suit tlie size of the partisans, 
and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. 
Not less remarkable is the overf aith of each man in 
the importance of what he has to do or say. The 
poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he 
utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. 
The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with 
an emphasis not to be mistaken, that " God him- 
self cannot do without wise men." Jacob Behmen 
and George Fox betray their egotism in the perti- 
nacity of their controversial tracts, and James Nay- 
lor once suffered himself to be w^orshipped as the 
Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify 
himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and 
shoes sacred. However this ma}^ discredit such per- 
sons with the judicious, it helps them with the peo- 
ple, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to 
their words. A similar experience is not infrequent 
in private life. Each young and ardent person 
writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer 
and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The 
pages thus written are to him burning and fragrant ; 
he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the 
morning star ; he wets them with his tears ; they 
are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet 
to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man- 
child that is born to the soul, and her life still cir- 
culates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet 



NATURE. 181 

been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins 
to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experi- 
ence, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes 
the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes ? 
The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from 
the writing to conversation, with easy transition, 
which strikes the other party with astonishment and 
vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. 
Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with 
angels of darkness and of light have engraved their 
shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He 
suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. 
Is there then no friend ? He cannot yet credit that 
one may have impressive experience and yet may 
not know how to put his private fact into literature : 
and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other 
tongues and ministers than .we, that though we 
should hold our peace the truth would not the less 
be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our 
zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does 
not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. 
It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst 
he utters it. As soon as he is released from the 
instinctive and particular and sees its partiality, he 
shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can write 
anything who does not think that what he writes is 
for the time the history of the world ; or do any- 
thing^ well who does not esteem his work to be of 



182 NATURE. 

importance. My work may be of none, but I must 
not think it of none, or I shall not do it with im- 
punity. 

In like manner, there is throughout nature some- 
thing mocking, something that leads us on and on, 
but arrives nowhere ; keeps no faith with us. All 
promise outruns the performance. We live in a 
system of approximations. Every end is prospec- 
tive of some other end, which is also temporary ; 
a round and final success nowhere. We are en- 
camped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and 
thirst lead us on to eat and to drink ; but bread and 
wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us 
hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is 
the same with all our arts and performances. Our 
music, our poetry, our language itself are not satis- 
factions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, 
which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the 
eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly 
to secure the ends of good sense and beauty from 
the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. 
But what an operose method! What a train of 
means to secure a little conversation ! This palace 
of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, 
these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock 
and file of mortgages ; trade to all the world, coun- 
try-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a 
little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual ! Could 



NATURE. 183 

it not be had as well by beggars on tbe high- 
way? No, all these things came from successive 
efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the 
wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversa- 
tion, character, were the avowed enda.; wealth was 
good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the 
smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought 
friends together in a warm and quiet room, and 
kept the children and the dinner-table in a differ- 
ent apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the 
ends ; but it was laiown that men of thought and 
virtue - sometimes had the hea^dache, or wet feet, or 
could lose good time whilst the room was getting 
warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions 
necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main 
attention has been diverted to this object; the 
old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove 
friction has come to be the end. That is the ridi- 
cule of rich men ; and Boston, London, Vienna, and 
now the governments generally of the world are 
cities and governments of the rich ; and the masses 
are not men, but poor men., that is, men who would 
be rich ; this is the ridicule of the class, that they 
arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; 
when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like 
one who has interrupted the conversation of a 
company to make his speech, and now has forgot- 
ten what he went to say. The appearance strikes 



184 NATURE. 

the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aim- 
less nations. Were tlie ends of nature so great 
and cogent as to exact this immense sacrifice of 
men? 

Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, 
as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye 
from the face of external nature. There is in 
woods and waters a certain enticement and flat- 
tery, together with a failure to yield a present sat- 
isfaction. This disappointment is felt in every 
landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty 
of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead, 
enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege 
of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much 
the draj)ery of this place and hour, as forelooking 
to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. 
It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds himself 
not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the 
river, the bank of flowers before him does not seem 
to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or 
this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo 
of the triumph that has passed by and is now at 
its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the 
neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, 
then in the adjacent woods. The present object 
shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a 
pageant which has just gone by. What splendid 
distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and love- 



NATURE. 1§5 

liness in the sunset ! But who can go where they 
are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? 
Off they fall from the round world forever and 
ever. It is the same among the men and women 
as among the silent trees ; always a referred exist- 
ence, an absence, never a presence and satisfac- 
tion. Is it that beauty can never be grasped ? in ^iyf~ 
persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible? 
The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wild- 
est charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. 
She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star : 
she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one 
as he. 

What shall we say of this omnipresent appear- 
ance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery 
and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? 
Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a 
slight treachery and derision ? Are we not en- 
gaged to a serious resentment of this use that is 
made of us ? Are we tickled trout, and fools of 
nature ? One look at the face of heaven and earth 
lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser 
convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts it- 
self into a vast promise, and will not be rashly ex- 
plained. Her secret is untold. Many and many 
an GEdipus arrives ; he has the whole mystery teem- 
ing in his brain. Alas ! the same sorcery has spoiled 
his skiU ; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her 



186 NATURE. 

miglity orbit vaults like the fresli rainbow into the 
deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough 
to follow it and report of the return of the curve. 
But it also appears that our actions are seconded and 
disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. 
We are escorted on every hand through life by spir- 
itual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait 
for us. We cannot bandy words with Nature, or 
deal with her as we deal with persons. If we meas- 
ure our individual forces against hers we may easily 
feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable des- 
tiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with 
the work, we feel that the soul of the workman 
streams through us, we shall find the peace of the 
morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fath- 
omless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over 
them, of life, preexisting within us in their highest 
form. 

The uneasiness which the thought of our help- 
lessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results 
from looking too much at one condition of nature, 
namely. Motion. But the drag is never taken from 
the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest 
or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over 
the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self- 
heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the 
fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are 
always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved 



NATURE. 187 

to them, we bring with us to every experiment the 
innate miiversal laws. These, while they exist in 
the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature for- 
ever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure 
the insanity of men. Our servitude to particu- 
lars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations. 
We anticipate a new era from the invention of a 
locomotive, or a balloon ; the new engine brings 
with it the old checks. They say that by electro- 
magnetism your salad shall be grown from the seed 
whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner ; it is a sym- 
bol of our modern aims and endeavors, of our con- 
densation and acceleration of objects ; — but noth- 
ing is gained ; nature cannot be cheated ; man's life 
is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow 
they slow. In these checks and impossibilities how- 
ever we find our advantage, not less than in the im- 
pulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are 
on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse 
the whole scale of being, from the centre to the 
poles of nature, and have some stake in every possi- 
bility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which 
philosophy and religion have too outwardly and lit- 
erally striven to express in the popular doctrine of 
the immortality of the soul. The reality is more 
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no dis- 
continuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations 
never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of 



188 NATURE. 

a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice be- 
comes water and gas. The world is mind precipi- 
tated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping 
again into the state of free thought. Hence the vir- 
tue and pungency of the influence on the mind 
of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. 
Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, 
speaks to man impersonated. That power which 
does not respect quantity, which makes the whole 
and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile 
to the morning, and distils its essence into every 
drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every 
object 5 for wisdom is infused into every form. It 
has been poured into us as blood ; it convulsed us 
as pain ; it slid into us as pleasure ; it enveloped us 
in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful la- 
bor ; we did not guess its essence until after a long 
time. 



POLITICS. 



Gold and iron are good 

To buy iron and gold ; 

All earth's fleece and food 

For their like are sold. 

Boded Merlin wise, 

Proved Napoleon great, — 

Nor kind nor coinage buys 

Aught above its rate. 

Fear, Craft, and Avarice 

Cannot rear a State. 

Out of dust to build 

What is more than dust, — = 

Walls Amphion piled 

Phoebus stablish must. 

When the Muses nine 

With the Virtues meet, 

Find to their design 

An Atlantic seat. 

By green orchard boughs 

Fended from the heat, 

Where the statesman ploughs 

Furrow for the wheat ; 

When the Church is social worth, 

When the state-house is the hearth, 

Then the perfect State is come, 

The republican at home. 



VII. 
POLITICS. 



In dealing with the State we ought to remember 
that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they 
existed before we were born ; that they are not su- 
perior to the citizen ; that every one of them was 
once the act of a single man ; every law and usage 
was a man's expedient to meet a particular case ; 
that they all are imitable, all alterable ; we may 
make as good, we may make better. Society is an 
illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in 
rigid repose, with certain names, men and institu- 
tions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round 
which all arrange themselves the best they can. 
But the old statesman knows that society is fluid ; 
there are no such roots and centres, but any parti- 
cle may suddenly become the centre of the move- 
ment and compel the system to gyrate round it ; as 
every man of strong will, like Pisistratus or Crom- 
well, does for a time, and every man of truth, like 
Plato or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on 
necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with 



192 politics: 

levity. Republics abound in young civilians who 
believe that the laws make the city, that grave 
modifications of the policy and modes of living and 
employments of the population, that commerce, ed- 
ucation, and religion, may be voted in or out ; and 
that any measure, though it were absurd, may be 
imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient 
voices to make it a law. But the wise know that 
foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes 
in the twisting ; that the State must follow and 
not lead the character and progress of the citizen ; 
the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of ; and 
they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity ; 
and that the form of government which prevails is 
the expression of what cultivation exists in the pop- 
ulation which permits it. The law is only a mem- 
orandum. We are superstitious, and esteem the 
statute somewhat: so much life as it has in the 
character of living men is its force. The statute 
stands there to say. Yesterday we agreed so and so, 
but how feel ye this article to-day? Our statute 
is a currency which we stamp with our own por- 
trait : it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in pro- 
cess of time will return to the mint. Nature is not 
democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, 
and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her 
authority by the pertest of her sons ; and as fast as 
the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the 



POLITICS. 193 

code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks 
not articulately, and must be made to. Meantime 
tlie education of the general mind never stops. 
The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. 
What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, 
and paints to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying 
aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public 
bodies ; then shall be carried as grievance and bill 
of rights through conflict and war, and then shall 
be triumphant law and establishment for a hun- 
dred years, until it gives place in turn to new pray- 
ers and pictures. The history of the State sketches 
in coarse outline the progress of thought, and fol- 
lows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of as- 
piration. 

The theory of politics which has possessed the 
mind of men, and which they have expressed the 
best they could in their laws and in their revolu- 
tions, considers persons and property as the two ob- 
jects for whose protection government exists. Of 
persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being 
identical in nature. This interest of course with 
its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst the 
rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their 
access to reason, their rights in property are very 
unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another 
owns a county. This accident, depending primari- 
ly on the skill and virtue of the parties, of which 



194 POLITICS. 

there is every degree, and secondarily on patrimo- 
ny, falls unequally, and its rights of course are 
unequal. Personal rights, universally the same, 
demand a government framed on the ratio of the 
census ; property demands a government framed 
on the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, who 
has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by 
an officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall 
drive them off ; and pays a tax to that end. Jacob 
has no flocks or herds and no fear of the Midian- 
ites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit 
that Laban and Jacob should have equal rights to 
elect the officer who is to defend their persons, but 
that Laban and not Jacob should elect the officer 
who is to guard the sheep and cattle. And if ques- 
tion arise whether additional officers or watch-tow- 
ers should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, 
and those who must sell part of their herds to buy 
protection for the rest, judge better of this, and with 
more right, than Jacob, who, because he is a youth 
and a traveller, eats their bread and not his own ? 

In the earliest society the proprietors made their 
own wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners 
in the direct way, no other opinion would arise in 
any equitable community than that property should 
make the law for property, and persons the law for 
persons. 

But property passes through donation or inherit- 



POLITICS. 195 

ance to those who do not create it. Gift, in one 
ease, makes it as really the new owner's, as labor 
made it the first owner's : in the other case, of pat- 
rimony, the law makes an ownership which will be 
valid in each man's view according to the estimate 
which he sets on the public tranquillity. 

It was not however found easy to embody the 
readily admitted principle that property should 
make law for property, and persons for persons ; 
since persons and property mixed themselves in 
every transaction. At last it seemed settled that 
the rightful distinction was that the proprietors 
should have more elective franchise than non-pro- 
prietors, on the Spartan principle of " calling that 
which is just, equal ; not that which is equal, just." 

That principle no longer looks so self-evident as 
it appeared in former times, partly because doubts 
have arisen whether too much weight had not been 
allowed in the laws to property, and such a struc- 
ture given to our usages as allowed the rich to en- 
croach on the poor, and to keep them poor ; but 
mainly because there is an instinctive sense, how- 
ever obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole 
constitution of property, on its present tenures, is 
injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating 
and degrading ; that truly the only interest for the 
consideration of the State is persons ; that property 
will always follow persons ; that the highest end of 



196 POLITICS. 

government is tlie culture of men ; and that if men 
can be educated, the institutions will share their 
improvement and the moral sentiment will write 
the law of the land. 

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this ques- 
tion, the peril is less when we take note of our nat- 
ural defences. We are kept by better guards than 
the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly 
elect. Society always consists in greatest part of 
young and foolish persons. The old, who have 
seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, 
die and leave no wisdom to their sons. They be- 
lieve their own newspaper, as their fathers did at 
their age. With such an ignorant and deceivable 
ma,jority, States would soon run to ruin, but that 
there are limitations beyond which the folly and 
ambition of governors cannot go. Things have their 
laws, as well as men ; and things refuse to be trifled 
with. Property will be protected. Corn will not 
grow unless it is planted and manured ; but the 
farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chances 
are a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest 
it. Under any forms, persons and property must 
and will have their just sway. They exert their 
power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover 
up a pound of earth never so cunningly, divide and 
subdivide it ; melt it to liquid, convert it to gas ; it 
will always weigh a pound; it will always attract 



POLITICS. 197 

and resist other matter by the full virtue of one 
pound weight : — and the attributes of a person, his 
wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under any 
law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force, 
— if not overtly, then covertly ; if not for the law, 
then against it ; if not wholesomely, then poison- 
ously ; with right, or by might. 

The boundaries of personal influence it is impos- 
sible to fix, as persons are organs of moral or super- 
natural force. Under the dominion of an idea 
which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil 
freedom, or the religious sentiment, the powers of 
persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A 
nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or con- 
quest can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, 
and achieve extravagant actions, out of all propor- 
tion to their means ; as the Greeks, the Saracens, 
the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have 
done. 

In like manner to every particle of property be- 
longs its own attraction. A cent is the representa- 
tive of a certain quantity of corn or other commod- 
ity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal 
man. It is so much warmth, so much bread, so 
much water, so much land. The law may do what 
it will with the owner of property ; its just power 
will still attach to the cent. The law may in a 
mad freak say that all shall have power except the 



198 POLITICS. 

owners of property ; they sliall have no vote. 
Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, 
year after year, write every statute that respects 
property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe 
of the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, 
the whole power of property will do, either through 
the law or else in defiance of it. Of course I speak 
of all the property, not merely of the great estates. 
When the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, 
it is the joint treasury of the poor which exceeds 
their accumulations. Every man owns something, 
if it is only a cow, or a wheel-barrow, or his arms, 
and so has that property to dispose of. 

The same necessity which secures the rights of 
person and property against the malignity or folly 
of the magistrate, determines the form and meth- 
ods of governing, which are proper to each nation 
and to its habit of thought, and nowise transferable 
to other states of society. In this country we are 
very vain of our political institutions, which are 
singular in this, that they sprung, within the mem- 
ory of living men, from the character and condition 
of the people, which they still express with suffi- 
cient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously prefer them 
to any other in history. They are not better, but 
only fitter for us. We may be wise in asserting 
the advantage in modern times of the democratic 
form, but to other states of society, in which relig. 



POLITICS. 199 

ion consecrated the monarchical, that and not this 
was expedient. Democracy is better for us, be- 
cause the religious sentiment of the present time 
accords better with it. Born democrats, we are no- 
wise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our 
fathers living in the monarchical idea, was also rel- 
atively right. But our institutions, though in coin- 
cidence with the spirit of the age, have not any 
exemption from the practical defects which have 
discredited other forms. Every actual State is 
corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too 
well. What satire on government can equal the 
severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, 
which now for ages has signified cim7iing, intimat- 
ing that the State is a trick ? 

The same benign necessity and the same practi- 
cal abuse appear in the parties, into which each 
State divides itself, of opponents and defenders of 
the administration of the government. Parties are 
also founded on instincts, and have better guides to 
their own humble aims than the sagacity of their 
leaders. They have nothing perverse in their ori- 
gin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. 
We might as wisely reprove the east wind or the 
frost, as a political party, whose members, for the 
most part, could give no account of their position, 
but stand for the defence of those interests in 
which they find themselves. Our quarrel with 



200 POLITICS. 

them begins when tliey quit tliis deep natural 
ground at the bidding of some leader, and obeying 
personal considerations, throw themselves into the 
maintenance and defence of points nowise belong- 
ing to their system. A party is perpetually cor- 
rupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the as- 
sociation from dishonesty, we cannot extend the 
same charity to their leaders. They reap the re- 
wards of the docility and zeal of the masses which 
they direct. Ordinarily our parties are parties of 
circumstance, and not of principle ; as the planting 
interest in conflict with the commercial ; the party 
of capitalists and that of operatives : parties which 
are identical in their moral character, and which 
can easily change ground with each other in the 
support of many of their measures. Parties of 
principle, as, religious sects, or the party of free- 
trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, 
of abolition of capital punishment, — degenerate 
into personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. 
The vice of our leading parties in this country 
(which may be cited as a fair specimen of these so- 
cieties of opinion) is that they do not plant them- 
selves on the deep and necessary grounds to which 
they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves 
to fury in the carrying of some local and momen- 
tary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth. 
Of the two great parties which at this hour almost 



POLITICS. 201 

share the nation between them, I should say that 
one has the best cause, and the other contains the 
best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the relig- 
ious man, will of course wish to cast his vote with 
the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for 
the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, 
and for facilitating in every manner the access of 
the young and the poor to the sources of wealth 
and power. But he can rarely accept the persons 
whom the so-called popular party propose to him 
as representatives of these liberalities. They have 
not at heart the ends which give to the name of 
democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The 
spirit of our American radicalism is destructive 
and aimless : it is not loving ; it has no ulterior and 
divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred 
and selfishness. On the other side, the conserva- 
tive party, composed of the most moderate, able, 
and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and 
merely defensive of property. It vindicates no 
right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, 
it proposes no generous policy ; it does not build, 
nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, 
nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor 
emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the 
Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, 
when in power, has the world any benefit to expect 
in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate 
with the resources of the nation. 



202 POLITICS. 

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. 
We are not at the mercy of any waves of chance. 
In the strife of ferocious parties, human nature al- 
ways finds itself cherished ; as the children of the 
convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy 
a moral sentiment as other children. Citizens of 
feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institu- 
tions lapsing into anarchy, and the older and more 
cautious among ourselves are learning from Euro- 
peans to look with some terror at our turbulent 
freedom. It is said that in our license of constru- 
ing the Constitution, and in the despotism of pub- 
lic opinion, we have no anchor; and one foreign 
observer thinks he has found the safeguard in the 
sanctity of Marriage among us ; and another thinks 
he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames 
expressed the popular security more wisely, when 
he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying 
that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, 
but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the 
bottom ; whilst a republic is a raft, which would 
never sink, but then your feet are always in water. 
No forms can have any dangerous importance whilst 
we are befriended by the laws of things. It makes 
no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere 
presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure 
resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass a 
thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long 



POLITICS. 203 

as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two 
poles, of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is 
universal, and each force by its own activity devel- 
ops the other. Wild liberty develops iron con- 
science. Want of liberty, by strengthening law 
and decorum, stupefies conscience. 'Lynch-law' 
prevails only where there is greater hardihood and 
self-subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot be 
a permanency; everybody's interest requires that 
it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all. 

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent neces- 
sity which shines through all laws. Human nature 
expresses itself in them as characteristically as in 
statues, or songs, or railroads ; and an abstract of 
the codes of nations would be a transcript of the 
common conscience. Governments have their ori- 
gin in the moral identity of men. Reason for one 
is seen to be reason for another, and for every other. 
There is a middle measure which satisfies all par- 
ties, be they never so many or so resolute for their 
own. Every man finds a sanction for his simplest 
claims and deeds, in decisions of his own mind, 
which he calls Truth and Holiness. In these de- 
cisions all the citizens find a perfect agreement, and 
only in these ; not in what is good to eat, good to 
wear, good use of time, or what amount of land or 
of public aid each is entitled to claim. This truth 
and justice men presently endeavor to make appli- 



204 POLITICS. 

cation of to the measuring of land, tlie apportion- 
ment of service, the protection of life and property. 
Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. 
Yet absolute right is the first governor ; or, every 
government is an impure theocracy. The idea 
after which each community is aiming to make and 
mend its law, is the will of the wise man. The 
wise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes awk- 
ward but earnest efforts to secure his government 
by contrivance ; as by causing the entire people to 
give their voices on every measure ; or by a double 
choice to get the representation of the whole ; or 
by a selection of the best citizens ; or to secure the 
advantages of efficiency and internal peace by con- 
fiding the government to one, who may himself 
select his agents. All forms of government sym- 
bolize an immortal government, common to all dy- 
nasties and independent of numbers, perfect where 
two men exist, perfect where there is only one 
man. 

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement 
to him of the character of his fellows. My right 
and my wrong is their right and their wrong. 
Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from 
what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree 
in our means, and work together for a time to one 
end. But whenever I find my dominion over my- 
self not sufficient for me, and undertake the direc^ 



POLITICS. 205 

tion of him also, I overstep tlie truth, and come 
into false relations to him. I may have so much 
more skill or strength than he that he cannot ex- 
press adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, 
and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and 
nature cannot maintain the assumption ; it must be 
executed by a practical lie, namely by force. This 
undertaking for another is the blunder which stands 
in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world. 
It is the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only 
not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a 
great difference between my setting myself down to 
a self-control, and my going to make somebody else 
act after my views ; but when a quarter of the 
human race assume to tell me what I must do, I 
may be too much disturbed by the circumstances 
to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. 
Therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic 
beside private ones. For any laws but those which 
men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put 
myself in the place of my child, and we stand in 
one thought and see that things are thus or thus, 
that perception is law for him and me. We are 
both there, both act. But if, without carrying him 
into the thought, I look over into his plot, and, guess- 
ing how it is with him, ordain this or that, he will 
never obey me. This is the history of governments, 
• — one man does something which is to bind an- 



206 POLITICS. 

other. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, 
taxes me ; looking from afar at me ordains that a 
part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical 
end, — not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Be- 
hold the consequence. Of all debts men are least 
willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on 
government I Everywhere they think they get 
their money's worth, except for these. 

Hence the less government we have the better, 
— the fewer laws, and the less confided power. 
The antidote to this abuse of formal Government 
is the influence of private character, the growth of 
the Individual ; the appearance of the principal to 
supersede the proxy ; the appearance of the wise 
man ; of whom the existing government is, it must 
be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all 
things tend to educe ; which freedom, cultivation, 
intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is 
character ; that is the end of Nature, to reach unto 
this coronation of her king. To educate the wise 
man the State exists, and with the appearance of 
the wise man the State expires. The appearance 
of character makes the State unnecessary. The 
wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or 
navy, — he loves men too well ; no bribe, or feast, 
or palace, to draw friends to him ; no vantage 
ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no 
library, for he has not done thinking ; no church, 



POLITICS. 20T 

for he is a prophet ; no statute book, for he has the 
lawgiver ; no money, for he is value ; no road, for 
he is at home where he is ; no experience, for the 
life of the creator shoots through him, and looks 
from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he 
who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of 
all men unto him needs not husband and educate 
a few to share with him a select and poetic life. 
His relation to men is angelic ; his memory is 
myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and 
flowers. 

We think our civilization near its meridian, but 
we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morn- 
ing star. In our barbarous society the influence of 
character is in its infancy. As a political power, as 
the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from 
their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. 
Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it ; the Annual 
Register is silent ; in the Conversations' Lexicon 
it is not set down ; the President's Message, the 
Queen's Speech, have not mentioned it; and yet 
it is never nothing. Every thought which genius 
and piety throw into the world, alters the world. 
The gladiators in the lists of power feel, through 
all their frocks of force and simulation, the pres- 
ence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and 
ambition is confession of this divinity; and suc- 
cesses in those fields are the poor amends, the fig- 



208 POLITICS. 

leaf with wliicli tlie shamed soul attempts to hide 
its nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in 
all quarters. It is because we know how much is 
due from us that we are impatient to show some 
petty talent as a substitute for worth. We are 
haunted by a conscience of this right to grandeur 
of character, and are false to it. But each of us 
has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or grace- 
ful, or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. That 
we do, as an apology to others and to ourselves for 
not reaching the mark of a good and equal life. 
But it does not satisfy us., whilst we thrust it on 
the notice of our companions. It may throw dust 
in their eyes, but does not smooth our own brow, 
or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we 
walk abroad. We do penance as we go. Our tal- 
ent is a sort of expiation, and we are constrained 
to reflect on our splendid moment with a certain 
humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as one 
act of many acts, a fair expression of our perma^ 
uent energy. Most persons of ability meet in so- 
ciety with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to 
say, ' I am not all here.' Senators and presidents 
have climbed so high with pain enough, not be- 
cause they think the place specially agreeable, but 
as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their 
manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is 
their compensation to themselves for being of a 



POLITICS. 209 

poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they 
can. Like one class of forest animals, they have 
nothing but a prehensile tail ; climb they must, or 
crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured 
that he could enter into strict relations with the 
best persons and make life serene around him by 
the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he 
afford to circumvent the favor of the caucus and 
the press, and covet relations so hollow and pom- 
pous as those of a politician ? Surely nobody would 
be a charlatan who could afford to be sincere. 

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self- 
government, and leave the individual, for all code, 
to the rewards and penalties of his own constitu- 
tion; which work with more energy than we be- 
lieve whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The 
movement in this direction has been very marked 
in modern history. Much has been blind and dis- 
creditable, but the .nature of the revolution is not 
affected by the vices of the revolters; for this is 
a purely moral force. It was never adopted by 
any party in history, neither can be. It separates 
the individual from all party, and unites him at the 
same time to the race. It promises a recognition 
of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or 
the security of property. A man has a right to be 
employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. 
The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never 

VOL. III. • 14 



210 POLITICS. 

been tried. We must not imagine that all things 
are lapsing into confusion if every tender protest- 
ant be not compelled to bear liis part in certain 
social conventions ; nor doubt that roads can be 
built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, 
when the government of force is at an end. Are 
our methods now so excellent that all competition is 
hopeless ? could not a nation of friends even devise 
better ways ? On the other hand, let not the most 
conservative and timid fear anything from a pre- 
mature surrender of the bayonet and the system of 
force. For, according to the order of nature, which 
is quite superior to our will, it stands thus ; there 
will always be a government of force where men 
are selfish ; and when they are pure enough to ab- 
jure the code of force they will be wise enough to 
see how these public ends of the post-office, of the 
highway, of commerce and the exchange of prop- 
erty, of museums and libraries, of institutions of 
art and science can be answered. 

We live in a very low state of the world, and 
pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on 
force. There is not, among the most religious and 
instructed men of the most religious and civil na- 
tions, a reliance on the moral sentiment and a suf- 
ficient belief in the unity of things, to persuade 
them that society can be maintained without artifi- 
cial restraints, as well as the solar system ; or that 



POLITICS. 211 

the private citizen miglit be reasonable and a good 
neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. 
What is strange too, there never was in any man 
sufficient faith in the power of rectitude to inspire 
him with the broad design of renovating the State 
on the principle of right and love. AH those who 
have pretended this design have been partial re- 
formers, and have admitted in some manner the 
supremacy of the bad State. I do not call to mind 
a single human being who has steadily denied the 
authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his 
own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius 
and full of faith as they are, -are not entertained 
except avowedly as air-pictures. If the individual 
who exhibits them dare to think them practicable, 
he disgusts scholars and churchmen ; and men of 
talent and women of superior sentiments cannot 
hide their contempt. Not the less does nature con- 
tinue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of 
this enthusiasm, and there are now men, — if in- 
deed I can speak in the plural number, — more ex- 
actly, I will say, I have just been conversing with 
one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience 
will make it for a moment appear impossible that 
thousands of human beings might exercise towards 
each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, 
as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers. 



NOMINALIST AND REALISTo 



In countless upward-striving waves 

The moon-drawn tide-wave strives : 

In thousand far-transplanted grafts 

The parent fruit survives ; 

So, in the new-born millions, 

The perfect Adam lives. 

Not less are summer mornings dear 

To every child they wake, 

And each with novel life his sphere 

Fills for his proper sake. 



VIII. 
NOMINALIST AND KEALIST. 



I CANNOT often enough say that a man is only a 
relative and representative nature. Each is a hint 
of the truth, but far enough from being that truth 
which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests 
to us. If I seek it in him I shall not find it. Could 
any man conduct into me the pure stream of that 
which he pretends to be ! Long afterwards I find 
that quality elsewhere which he promised me. The 
genius of the Platonists is intoxicating to the stu- 
dent, yet how few particulars of it can I detach 
from all their books. The man momentarily stands 
for the thought, but will not bear examination ; and 
a society of men will cursorily represent well enough 
a certain quality and culture, for example, chivalry 
or beauty of manners ; but separate them and there 
is no gentleman and no lady in the group. The least 
hint sets us on the pursuit of a character which no 
man realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes that 
on seeing the smallest arc we complete the curve, 
and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram 



216 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that 
no more was drawn than just that fragment of an 
arc which we first beheld. We are greatly too lib- 
eral in our construction of each other's faculty and 
promise. E?i:actly what the parties have already 
done they shall do again ; but that which we in- 
ferred from their nature and inception, they will 
not do. That is in nature, but not in them. That 
happens in the world, which we often witness in 
a public debate. Each of the sj)eakers expresses 
himself imperfectly ; no one of them hears much 
that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind 
of each ; and the audience, who have only to hear 
and not to speak, judge very wisely and superiorly 
how wrongheaded and anskilful is each of the de- 
baters to his own affair. Great men or men of great 
gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men 
never. When I meet a pure intellectual force or a 
generosity of affection, I believe here then is man ; 
and am presently mortified by the discovery that 
this individual is no more available to his own or to 
the general ends than his companions ; because the 
power which drew my respect is not supported by 
the total symphony of his talents. All persons exist 
to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility 
which they have. We borrow the proportions of 
the man from that one fine feature, and finish the 
portrait symmetrically*^; which is false, for the rest 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST, 217 

of his body is small or deformed. I observe a per- 
son wlio makes a good public appearance, and con- 
clude tlience the perfection of his private character, 
on which this is based ; but he has no private char- 
acter. He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holi- 
days. All our poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly 
in some one or in many parts to satisfy our idea, 
fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave 
us without any hope of realization but in our own 
future. Our exaggeration of all fine characters 
arises from the fact that we identify each in turn 
with the soul. But there are no such men as we 
fable; no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Caesar, nor An- 
gelo, nor Washington, such as we have made. We 
consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it was 
allowed by great men. There is none without his 
foible. I believe that if an angel should come to 
chant the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too 
much gingerbread, or take liberties with private 
letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad 
enough that our geniuses cannot do anything use- 
ful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society 
who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, 
but he cannot come near without appearing a crip- 
ple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by 
solitude, or by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid 
worldly manner ; each concealing as he best can 
his incapacity for useful association, but they want 
either love or self-reliance. 



218 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

Our native love of reality joins with this experi- 
ence to teach us a little reserve, and to dissuade 
a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of 
persons. Young people admire talents or particu- 
lar excellences ; as we grow older we value total 
powers and effects, as the impression, the quality, 
the spirit of men and things. The genius is all. 
The man, — it is his system : we do not try a soli- 
tary word or act, but his habit. The acts which 
you praise, I praise not, since they are departures 
from his faith, and are mere compliances. The 
magnetism which arra^nges tribes and races in one 
polarity is alone to be respected ; the men are steel- 
filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say, 
' O steel-filing number one ! what heart-drawings 
I feel to thee ! what prodigious virtues are these of 
thine ! how constitutional to thee, and incommuni- 
cable ! ' Whilst we speak the loadstone is with- 
drawn ; down falls our filing in a heap with the 
rest, and we continue our mummery to the wretched 
shaving. Let us go for universals ; for the mag- 
netism, not for the needles. Human life and its 
persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal 
influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great, 
it is great ; if they say it is small, it is small ; you 
see it, and you see it not, by turns ; it borrows all 
its size from the momentary estimation of the speak- 
ers : the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 219 

near, vanishes if you go too far, and only blazes at 
one angle. Who can tell if Washington be a great 
man or no ? Who can tell if Franklin be ? Yes, 
or any but the twelve, or six, or three great gods 
of fame ? And they too loom and fade before the 
eternal. 

We are amphibious creatuii'es, weaponed for two 
elements, having two sets of faculties, the particu- 
lar and the catholic. We adjust our instrument 
for general observation, and sweep the heavens as 
easily as we pick out a single figure in the terres- 
trial landscape. We are practically skilful in de- 
tecting elements for which we have no place in our 
theory, and no name. Thus we are very sensible 
of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies 
of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical ad- 
dition of all their measurable properties. There 
is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found 
in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes 
the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, 
well-spoken England I should not find if I should 
go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, 
in the play-house, at dinner-tables, I might see a 
great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conven- 
tional, proud men, — many old women, — and not 
anywhere the Englishman who made the good 
speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did 
the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in 



220 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

America, where, from the intellectual quickness of 
the race, the genius of the country is more splen- 
did in its promise and more slight in its perform- 
ance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. 
We conceive distinctly enough the French, the 
Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less 
real that perhaps we should not meet in either of 
those nations a single individual who corresponded 
with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation 
in great measure from the language, which is a 
sort of monument to which each forcible individual 
in a course of many hundred years has contributed 
a stone. And, universally, a good example of this 
social force is the veracity of language, which can- 
not be debauched. In any controversy concerning 
morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the 
sentiments which the language of the people ex- 
presses. Proverbs, words, and grammar-inflections 
convey the public sense with more purity and pre- 
cision than the wisest individual. 

In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the 
Eealists had a good deal of reason. General ideas 
are essences. They are our gods : they round and 
ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. 
Our proclivity to details cannot' quite degrade our 
life and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is 
reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, 
yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 221 

His measures are the hours ; morning and night, 
solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy and all 
the lovely accidents of nature play through his 
mind. Money, which represents the prose of life, 
and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without 
an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful 
as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, 
and is always moral. The property will be found 
where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have 
been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time 
considered, with the compensations) in the individ- 
ual also. How wise the world appears, when the 
laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and 
the completeness of the municipal system is consid- 
ered! Nothing is left out. If you go into the 
markets and the custom-houses, the insurers' and 
notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights and 
measures, of inspection of provisions, — it will ap- 
pear as if one man had made it all. Wherever 
you go, a wit like your own has been before you, 
and has realized its thought. The Eleusinian mys- 
teries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian as- 
tronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there al- 
ways were seeing and knowing men in the planet. 
The world is full of masonic ties, of guilds, of se- 
cret and public legions of honor ; that of scholars, 
for example ; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing 
with the upper class of every country and every 
culture. 



222 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

I am very miicli struck in literature by the ap- 
pearance tliat one person wrote all the books ; as if 
the editor of a journal planted his body of report- 
ers in different parts of the field of action, and re- 
lieved some by others from time to time ; but there 
is such equality and identity both of judgment and 
point of view in the narrative that it is plainly 
the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. 
I looked into Pope's Odyssey yesterday : it is as 
correct and elegant after our canon of to-day as if 
it were newly written. The modernness of all good 
books seems to give me an existence as wide as 
man. What is well done I feel as if I did ; what 
is ill done I reck not of, Shakspeare's passages of 
passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in 
the very dialect of the present year. I am faithful 
again to the whole over the members in my use of 
books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book 
in a manner least flattering to the author. I read 
Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I might read a 
dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fa,ncy and 
the imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one 
should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, 
for its rich colors. 'T is not Proclus, but a piece of 
nature and fate that I explorCo It is a greater joy 
to see the author's author, than himself. A higher 
pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a con- 
cert, where I went to hear Handel's Messiah. As 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 223 

the master overpowered the littleness and incapa- 
bleness of the performers and made them conduc- 
tors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe 
what efforts nature was making, through so many 
hoarse, wooden, and imperfect persons, to produce 
beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and 
women. The genius of nature was paramount at 
the oratorio. 

This preference of the genius to the parts is the 
secret of that deification of art, which is found in 
all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is propor- 
tion, or a habitual respect to the whole by an eye 
loving beauty in details. And the wonder and 
charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it de- 
notes. Proportion is almost impossible to human 
beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. 
In conversation, men are encumbered with person- 
ality, and talk too much. In modern sculpture, 
picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous; 
the artist works here and there and at all points, 
adding and adding, instead of unfolding the unit of 
his thought. Beautiful details we must have, or no 
artist ; but they must be means and never other. 
The eye must not lose sight for a moment of the 
purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and 
the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. 
When they grow older, they respect the argument. 

We obey the same intellectual integrity when we 



224 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

study in exceptions tlie law of the world. Anom- 
alous facts, as tlie never quite obsolete rumors of 
magic and demonology, and tlie new allegations of 
phrenologists and neurologists, are of ideal use. 
They are good indications. Homoeopathy is insig- 
nificant as an art of healing, but of great value as 
criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the 
time. So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fou- 
rierism, and the Millennial Church ; they are poor 
pretensions enough, but good criticism on the sci- 
ence, philosophy, and preaching of the day. For 
these abnormal insights of the adepts ought to be 
normal, and things of course. 

All things show us that on every side we are very 
near to the best. It seems not worth while to exe- 
cute with too much pains some one intellectual, or 
sesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dream 
will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power. 
The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring 
of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting we beguile 
the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and 
with crimes. 

Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the 
agents with which we deal are subalterns, which we 
can well afford to let pass, and life will be sim]3ler 
when we live at the centre and flout the surfaces. 
1 wish to speak with all respect of persons, but some- 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 225 

times I must pincli myself to keep awake and pre- 
serve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each 
other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs 
an effort to treat them as individuals. Though the 
uninspired man certainly finds persons a conven- 
iency in household matters, the divine man does not 
respect them ; he sees them as a rack of clouds, or 
a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the sur- 
face of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Na- 
ture will not be Buddhist : she resents generalizing, 
and insults the philosopher in every moment with a 
million of fresh particulars. It is all idle talking : 
as much as a man is a whole, so is he also a part ; 
and it were partial not to see it. What you say in 
your pompous distribution only distributes you into 
your class and section. You have not got rid of 
parts by denying them, but are the more partial. 
You are one thing, but Nature is one thing and the 
other thing ^ in the same moment. She will not re- 
main orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons ; 
and when each person, inflamed to a fury of person- 
ality, would conquer all things to his poor crotchet, 
she raises up against him another person, and by 
many persons incarnates again a sort of whole. 
She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all 
the parts, work it how he may ; there will be some- 
body else, and the world will be round. Everything 
must have its flower or effort at the beautiful, 

VOL. III. 15 



226 NOMINALIST AND REALIST.. 

coarser or finer according to its stuff. They re- 
lieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of 
society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She 
punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an in- 
duction which is rare and casual. We like to come 
to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we 
value a general remark in conversation. But it is 
not the intention of Nature that we should live by 
general views. We fetch fire and water, run about' 
all day among the shops and markets, and get our 
clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the 
victims of these details ; and once in a fortnight we 
arrive perhaps at a rational moment. If we were 
not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from hour 
to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, 
but should have been burned or frozen long ago. 
She would never get anything done, if she suffered 
admirable Crichtons and universal geniuses. She 
loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of 
wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse ; for 
she is full of work, and these are her hands. As 
the frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall 
eat down the rowen, and swine shall eat the waste 
of his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs, — 
so our economical mother dispatches a new genius 
and habit of mind into every district and condition 
of existence, plants an eye wherever a new ray of 
light can fall, and gathering up into some man 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 227 

every property in the universe, establishes thou- 
sandfold occult mutual attractions among her off- 
spring, that all this wash and waste of power may 
be imparted and exchanged. 

Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this in- 
carnation and distribution of the godhead, and 
hence Nature has her maligners, as if she were 
Circe; and Alphonso of Castile fancied he could 
have given useful advice. But she does not go un- 
provided ; she has hellebore at the bottom of the 
cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of des- 
pots. The recluse thinks of men as having his 
manner, or as not having his manner ; and as hav- 
ing degrees of it, more and less. But when he 
comes into a public assembly he sees that men have 
very different manners from his own, and in their 
way admirable. In his childhood and youth he has 
had many checks and censures, and thinks mod- 
estly enough of his own endowment. When after- 
wards he comes to unfold it in propitious circum- 
stance, it seems the only talent; he is delighted 
with his success, and accounts himself already the 
fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into 
a banking house, into a mechanic's shop, into a 
mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and 
in each new place he is no better than an idiot; 
other talents take place, and rule the hour. The 
rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the 



228 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

meridian, readies to every gift of man, and we all 
take turns at the top. 

For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her 
heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it 
is so much easier to do what one has done before 
than to do a new thing, tha^t there is a perpetual 
tendency to a set mode. In every conversation, 
even the highest, there is a certain trick, which 
may be soon learned by an acute person and then 
that particular style continued indefinitely. Each 
man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would 
impose his idea on others ; and their trick is their 
natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race; 
but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps 
humanity by resisting this exuberance of power. 
Hence the immense benefit of party in politics, as 
it reveals faults of character in a chief, which the 
intellectual force of the persons, with ordinary op- 
portunity and not hurled into aphelion by hatred, 
could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, 
what benefit that there should be two stupidities ! 
It is like that brute advantage so essential to as- 
tronomy, of having the diameter of the earth's or- 
bit for a base of its triangles. Democracy is mo- 
rose, and runs to anarchy, but in the State and in 
the schools it is indispensable to resist the consol- 
idation of all men into a few men. If John was 
perfect, why are you and I alive ? As long as any 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 229 

man exists, there is some need of him; let him 
fight for his own. A new poet has appeared ; a 
new character approached us ; why should we re- 
fuse to eat bread until we have found his regiment 
and section in our old army-files ? Why not a new 
man ? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, 
of Skeneateles, of Northampton : why so impatient 
to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Koyalists, or 
Shakers, or by any known and effete name ? Let 
it be a new way of living. Why have only two or 
three ways of life, and not thousands ? Every 
man is wanted, and no man is wanted much. We 
came this time for condiments, not for corn. We 
want the great genius only for joy ; for one star 
more in our constellation, for one tree more in our 
grove. But he thinks we wish to belong to him, as 
he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. 
I think I have done well if I have acquired a new 
word from a good author; and my business with 
him is to find my own, though it were only to melt 
him down mto an epithet or an image for daily 
use: — 

" Into paint will I grind thee, my bride ! " 

To embroil the confusion, and make it impossi- 
ble to arrive at any general statement, — when we 
have insisted on the imperfection of individuals, 
our affections and our experience urge that every 



230 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous 
treatment is sure to be repaid. A recluse sees only- 
two or three persons, and allows them all their 
room ; they spread themselves at large. The states- 
man looks at many, and compares the few habitu- 
ally with others, and these look less. Yet are they 
not entitled to this generosity of reception ? and is 
not munificence the means of insight ? For though 
gamesters say that the cards beat all the players, 
though they were never so skilful, yet in the con- 
test we are now considering, the players are also 
the game, and share the power of the cards. If 
you criticise a fine genius, the odds are that you 
are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, 
are censuring your own caricature of him. For 
there is somewhat spheral and infinite in every 
man, especially in every genius, which, if you can 
come very near him, sports with all your limita- 
tions. For rightly every man is a channel through 
which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I was 
criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminat- 
ing my own soul. After taxing Goethe as a cour- 
tier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly, — I took up 
this book of Helena, and found him an Indian of 
the wilderness, a piece of pure nature like an apple 
or an oak, large as morning or night, and virtuous 
as a brier-rose. 

But care is taken that the whole tune shall be 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 231 

played. If we were not kept among surfaces, 
everything would be large and universal ; now the 
excluded attributes burst in on us with the more 
brightness that they have been excluded. " Your 
turn now, my turn next," is the rule of the game. 
The universality being hindered in its primary 
form, comes in the secondary form of all sides; 
the points come in succession to the meridian, and 
by the speed of rotation a new whole is formed. 
Nature keeps herself whole and her representation 
complete in the experience of each mind. She 
suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is 
the secret of the world that all things subsist and 
do not die but only retire a little from sight and 
afterwards return again. Whatever does not con- 
cern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person 
is no longer related to our present well-being, he is 
concealed, or dies., as we say. Really, all things 
and persons are related to us, but according to 
our nature they act on us not at once but in suc- 
cession, and we are made aware of their presence 
one at a time. All persons, all things which we 
have known, are here present, and many more than 
we see ; the world is full. As the ancient said, the 
world is a plenum or solid ; and if we saw all 
things that really surround us we should be impris- 
oned and unable to move. For though nothing is 
impassable to the soul, but all things are pervious 



232 NOBIINALIST AND REALIST. 

to it and like highways, yet this is only whilst the 
soul does not see them. As soon as the soul sees 
any object, it stops before that object. Therefore 
the divine Providence which keeps the universe 
open in every direction to the soul, conceals all the 
furniture and all the persons that do not concern a 
particular soul, from the senses of that individual. 
Through solidest eternal things the man finds his 
road as if they did not subsist, and does not once 
suspect their being. As soon as he needs a new 
object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer at- 
tempts to pass through it, but takes another way. 
When he has exhausted for the time the nourish- 
ment to be drawn from any one person or thing, 
that object is withdrawn from his observation, and 
though still in his immediate neighborhood, he does 
not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead : men 
feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals 
and mournful obituaries, and there they stand look- 
ing out of the window, sound and well, in some new 
and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is 
very well alive : nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, 
nor Aristotle ; at times we believe we have seen 
them all, and could easily tell the names under 
which they go. 

If we cannot make voluntary and conscious 
steps in the admirable science of universals, let us 
see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 233 

from the best particulars with a becoming charity. 
What is best in each kind is an index of what 
should be the average of that thing. Love shows 
me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in 
my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal 
depth of good in every other direction. It is com- 
monly said by farmers that a good pear or apple 
costs no more time or pains to rear than a poor 
one ; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or 
action, or thought, or friend, but the best. 

The end and the means, the gamester and the 
game, — life is made up of the intermixture and 
reaction of these two amicable powers, whose mar- 
riage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies 
and tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile 
the contradictions as we can, but their discord and 
their concord introduce wild absurdities into our 
thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the 
whole truth, and the only way in which we can be 
just, is by giving ourselves the lie ; Speech is bet- 
ter than silence ; silence is better than speech ; — 
All things are in contact ; every atom has a sphere 
of repulsion ; — Things are, and are not, at the 
same time ; — and the like. All the universe over, 
there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator- 
creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any 
proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly 
therefore I assert that every man is a partialist ; 



234 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

that nature secures Mm as an instrument by self- 
conceit, preventing tlie tendencies to religion and 
science ; and now further assert, that, each man's 
genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he 
is justified in his individuality, as his nature is 
found to be immense ; and now I add that every 
man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst 
it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around 
the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of 
its rational children, the most dedicated to his pri- 
vate affair, works out, though as it were under 
a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men 
are individuals ; so are pumpkins ; but every pump- 
kin in the field goes through every point of pump- 
kin history. The rabid democrat, as soon as he is 
senator and rich man, has ripened beyond possibil- 
ity of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist 
the sun, he must be conservative the remainder of 
his days. Lord Eldon said in his old age that "■ if 
he were to begin life again, he would be damned 
but he would begin as agitator." 

We hide this universality if we can, but it ap- 
pears at all points. We are as ungrateful as chil- 
dren. There is nothing we cherish and strive to 
draw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. 
We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance 
and the life of the senses ; then goes by, perchance, 
a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 235 

making the commonest offices beautiful by the en- 
ergy and heart with which she does them ; and see- 
ing this we admire and love her and them, and say, 
' Lo ! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dis- 
sipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, 
religion, society, or care ! ' insinuating a treachery 
and contempt for all we had so long loved and 
wrought in ourselves and others. 

If we could have any security against moods ! 
If the profound est prophet could be holden to his 
words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and 
join the crusade could have any certificate that to- 
morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony ! 
But the Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and 
never interposes an adamantine syllable ; and the 
most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if 
the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, 
and planted there for the succor of the world, shall 
in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same 
speaker, as morbid ; "I thought I was right, but I 
was not," — and the same immeasurable credulity 
demanded for new audacities. If we were not of 
all opinions ! if we did not in any moment shift the 
platform on which we stand, and look and speak 
from another ! if there could be any regulation, 
any '- one-hour-rule,' that a man should never leave 
his point of view without sound of trumpet. I 
am always insincere, as always knowing there are 
other moods. 



236 NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying 
all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling 
that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the 
parties to know each other, although they use the 
same words ! My companion assumes to know my 
mood and habit of thought, and we go on from 
explanation to explanation until all is said which 
words can, and we leave matters just as they were 
at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it 
that every man believes every other to be an in- 
curable partialist, and himself a universalist ? I 
talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers ; I en- 
deavored to show my good men that I liked every- 
thing by turns and nothing long ; that I loved the 
centre, but doated on the superficies ; that I loved 
man, if men seemed to me mice and rats ; that I 
revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan 
world stood its ground and died hard ; that I was 
glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would 
not live in their arms. Could they but once under- 
stand that I loved to know that they existed, and 
heartily wished them God-speed, yet, out of my 
poverty of life and thought, had no word or wel- 
come for them when they came to see me, and 
could well consent to their living in Oregon for 
any claim I felt on them, — it would be a great 
satisfaction. 



NEW ENGLAND REFOEMEES. 



In the suburb, in the town, 
On the railway, in the square. 
Came a beam of goodness down 
Doubling daylight everywhere : 
Peace now each for malice takes. 
Beauty for his sinful weeds. 
For the angel Hope aye makes 
Him an angel whom she leadso 



NEW ENGLAND REFOEMEES. 

A LECTUKE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IN AMORY 
HALL, ON SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 1844. 

Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance 
with society in New England during the last twen- 
ty-five years, with those middle and with those lead- 
ing sections that may constitute any just represen- 
tation of the character and aim of the community, 
will have been struck with the great activity of 
thought and experimenting. His attention must be 
commanded by the signs that the Church, or relig- 
ious party, is falling from the Church nominal, and 
is appearing in temperance and non-resistance socie- 
ties; in movements of abolitionists and of social- 
ists ; and in very significant assemblies called Sab- 
bath and Bible Conventions ; composed of ultraists, 
of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, 
and meeting to call in question the authority of the 
Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the Church. In 
these movements nothing was more remarkable 
than the discontent they begot in the movers. The 
spirit of protest and of detachment drove the mem- 
bers of these Conventions to bear testimony against 



240 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

the Churcli, and immediately afterwards to declare 
their discontent with these Conventions, their inde- 
pendence of their colleagues^ and their impatience 
of the methods whereby they were working. They 
defied each other, like a congress of kings, each of 
whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own 
that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility 
of projects for the salvation of the world ! One 
apostle thought all men should go to farming, and 
another that no man should buy or sell, that the use 
of money was the cardinal evil ; another that the 
mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink 
damnation. These made unleavened bread, and 
were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in 
vain urged by the housewife that God made yeast, 
as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as 
dearly as he loves vegetation; that fermentation 
develops the saccharine element in the grain, and 
makes it more palatable and more digestible. No ; 
they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall 
not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant 
advances of thine ; let us scotch these ever-rolling 
wheels ! Others attacked the system of agricul- 
ture, the use of animal manures in farming, and 
the tyranny of man over brute nature ; these abuses 
polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the 
plough and the horse from the cart, the hundred 
acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 241 

walk, wlierever boats and locomotives will not carry 
liim. Even tlie insect world was to be defended, — 
that had been too long neglected, and a society for 
the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosqui- 
tos was to be incorporated without delay. With 
these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hy- 
dropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their 
wonderful theories of the Christian miracles ! Oth- 
ers assailed particular vocations, as that of the law- 
yer, that of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of 
the clergyman, of the scholar. Others attacked the 
institution of marriage as the fountain of social 
evils. Others devoted themselves to the worrying 
of churches and meetings for public worship ; and 
the fertile forms of antinomianism among the elder 
puritans seemed to have their match in the plenty 
of the new harvest of reform. 

With this din of opinion and debate there was a 
keener scrutiny of institutions and domestic life 
than any we had known ; there was sincere protest- 
ing against existing evils, and there were changes 
of employment dictated by conscience. No doubt 
there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of backslid- 
ing might occur. But in each of these movements 
emerged a good result, a tendency to the adoption 
of simpler methods, and an assertion of the suffi- 
ciency of the private man. Thus it was directly in 
the spirit and genius of the age, what hajopened in 



242 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

one instance wlien a cliurcli censured and threatened 
to excommunicate one of its members on account 
of the somewhat hostile part to the church which 
his conscience led him to take in the anti-slavery busi- 
ness ; the threatened individual immediately ex- 
communicated the church, in a public and formal 
process. This has been several times repeated: it 
was excellent when it was done the first time, but 
of course loses all value when it is copied. Every 
project in the history of reform, no matter how vio- 
lent and surprising, is good when it is the dictate 
of a man's genius and constitution, but very dull 
and suspicious when adopted from another. It is 
right and beautiful in any man to say, ' I will take 
this coat, or this book, or this measure of corn of 
yours,' — in whom we see the act to be original, 
and to flow from the whole spirit and faith of him ; 
for then that taking will have a giving as free and 
divine ; but we are very easily disposed to resist 
the same generosity of speech when we miss origi- 
nality and truth to character in it. 

There was in all the practical activities of New 
England for the last quarter of a century, a grad- 
ual withdrawal of tender consciences from the so- 
cial organizations. There is observable throughout, 
the contest between mechanical and spiritual meth- 
ods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful 
and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spir- 
itual facts. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 243 

In politics for example it is easy to see tlie pro- 
gress of dissent. The country is full of rebellion ; 
the country is full of kings. Hands oif ! let there 
be no control and no interference in the adminis- 
tration of the affairs of this kingdom of me. 
Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the party 
of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that ex- 
periment, in the face of what appear incontestable 
facts. I confess, the motto of the Globe news- 
paper is so attractive to me that I can seldom find 
much appetite to read what is below it in its col- 
umns : " The world is governed too much." So 
the country is frequently affording solitary exam- 
ples of resistance to the government, solitary nul- 
lifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved 
rights ; nay, who have reserved all their rights ; 
who reply to the assessor and to the clerk of court 
that they do not know the State, and embarrass the 
courts of law by non-juring and the commander- 
in-chief of the militia by non-resistance. 

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent ap- 
peared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic 
society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism 
broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me 
the money with which I bought my coat ? Why 
should professional labor and that of the counting- 
house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of 
the porter and woodsawyer ? This whole business 



244 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it consti- 
tutes false relations between men ; inasmucli as I 
am prone to count myself relieved of any respon- 
sibility to behave well and nobly to that person 
whom I pay with money; whereas if I had not that 
commodity, I should be put on my good behavior 
in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to 
man, as being himself his only certificate that he 
had a right to those aids and services which each 
asked of the other. Am I not too protected a per- 
son ? is there not a wide disparity between the lot 
of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my 
poor sister ? Am I not defrauded of my best cul- 
ture in the loss of those g3rmnastics which manual 
labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute ? 
I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth 
conventions of society ; I do not like the close air 
of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a 
prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and 
luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity. 
The same insatiable criticism may be traced in 
the efforts for the reform of Education. The pop- 
ular education has been taxed with a want of truth 
and nature. It was complained that an education 
to things was not given. We are students of 
words : we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and 
recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come 
out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 245 

and do not know a thing. We cannot use our 
hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. 
We do not know an edible root in the woods, we 
cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of 
the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and 
skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a 
dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Koman rule was 
to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn 
standing. The old English rule was, ' All summer 
in the field, and all winter in the study.' And it 
seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, 
or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at 
all events, and not be painful to his friends and 
fellow-men. The lessons of science should be ex- 
perimental also. The sight of a planet through a 
telescope is worth all the course on astronomy ; the 
shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues 
all the theories ; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the 
firing of an artificial volcano, are better than vol- 
umes of chemistry. 

One of the traits of the new spirit is the in- 
quisition it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the 
dead languages. The ancient languages, with great 
beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of 
genius, which draw, and always will draw, certain 
likeminded men, — Greek men, and Roman men, — 
in all countries, to their study ; but by a wonderful 
drowsiness of usage they had exacted the study of 



246 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

all men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and 
Greek liad a strict relation to all the science and 
culture there was in Europe, and th^ Mathematics 
had a momentary importance at some era of activ- 
ity in physical science. These things became ste- 
reotyped as education.) as the manner of men is. 
But the Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, 
and though all men and boys were now drilled in 
Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left 
these shells high and dry on the beach, and was 
now creating and feeding other matters at other 
ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools 
and colleges this warfare against common sense 
still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil 
is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he 
leaves the University, as it is ludicrously styled, he 
shuts those books for the last time. Some thou- 
sands of young men are graduated at our colleges in 
this country every year, and the persons who, at 
forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on 
your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five 
persons I have seen who read Plato. 

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal 
talent of this country should be directed in its best 
years on studies which lead to nothing? What 
was the consequence? Some intelligent persons 
said or thought, 'Is that Greek and Latin some 
spell to conjure with, and not words of reason? If 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 247 

tlie pliysician, tlie law}^er, the divine, never use it 
to come at tlieir ends, I need never learn it to come 
at mine. Conjuring is gone out of fashion, and I 
will omit this conjugating, and go straight to af- 
fairs.' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and 
read law, medicine, or sermons, without it. To 
the astonishment of all, the self-made men took 
even ground at once with the oldest of the regular 
graduates, and in a few months the most conserva- 
tive circles of Boston and New York had quite 
forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, 
and who was not. 

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical 
speculation and in the rudest democratical move- 
ments, through all the petulance and all the puer- 
ility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous 
and arrive at short methods ; urged, as I suppose, 
by an intuition that the human spirit is equal to 
all emergencies, alone, and that man is more often 
injured than helped by the means he uses. 

I conceive this gradual casting off of material 
aids, and the indication of growing trust in the 
private self -supplied powers of the individual, to 
be the affirmative principle of the recent philos- 
ophy, and that it is feeling its own profound truth 
and is reaching forward at this very hour to the 
happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in 
this, as in every period of intellectual activity, 



248 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

there lias been a noise of denial and protest ; much 
was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by 
those who were reared in the old, before they could 
begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer 
perishes in his removal of rubbish ; and that makes 
the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; 
they are not equal to the work they pretend. They 
lose their way ; in the assault on the kingdom of 
darkness they expend all their energ}?' on some 
accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of 
benefit. It is of little moment that one or two or 
twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but 
of much that the man be in his senses. 

The criticism and attack on institutions, which 
we have witnessed, has made one thing plain, that 
society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself 
renovated, attempts to renovate things around him : 
he has become tediously good in some particular 
but negligent or narrow in the rest ; and hypocrisy 
and vanity are often the disgusting result. 

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment 
better than the establishment, and conduct that 
in the best manner, than to make a sally against 
evil by some single improvement, without sup- 
porting it by a total regeneration. Do not be so 
vain of your one objection. Do you think there 
is only one ? Alas I my good friend, there is no 
part of society or of life better than any other 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 249 

part. All our tilings are right and wrong together. 
The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike. 
Do you complain of our Marriage ? Our marriage 
is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, 
our social customs. Do you complain of the laws 
of Property ? It is a pedantry to give such impor- 
tance to them. Can we not play the game of life 
with these counters, as well as with those ? in the 
institution of property, as well as out of it ? Let 
into it the new and renewing principle of love, and 
property will be universality. No one gives the 
impression of superiority to the institution, v/hich 
he must give who will reform it. It makes no 
difference what you say, you must make me feel 
that you are aloof from it ; by your natural and 
supernatural advantages do easily see to the end 
of it, — do see how man can do without it. Now 
all men are on one side. No man deserves to be 
heard against property. Only Love, only an Idea, 
is against property as we hold it. 

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor 
to waste all my time in attacks. If I should go 
out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment 
X could never stay there five minutes. But why 
come out ? the street is as false as the church, and 
when I get to my house, or to my manners, or 
to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. 
When we see an easfer assailant of one of these 



250 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking 
him, Wliat riglit liave you, sir, to your one virtue ? 
Is virtue piecemeal ? This is a jewel amidst the 
rags of a beggar. 

In another way the right will be vindicated. In 
the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the 
aisles of false churches, alike in -one place and in 
another, — wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul 
finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, 
and by the new quality of character it shall put 
forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law or 
school in which it stands, before the law of its 
own mind. 

If partiality was one fault of the movement 
party, the other defect was their reliance on Asso- 
ciation. Doubts such as those I have intimated 
drove many good persons to agitate the questions 
of social reform. But the revolt against the spirit 
of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the 
inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear possible 
to individuals ; and to do battle against numbers 
they armed themselves with numbers, and against 
concert they relied on new concert. 

Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. 
Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen, three communities 
have already been formed in Massachusetts on 
kindred plans, and many more in the country at 
large. They aim to give every member a share in 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 251 

the manual labor, to give an equal reward to labor 
and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture with 
an education to labor. Tlie scheme offers, by the 
economies of associated labor and expense, to make 
every member rich, on the same amount of proper- 
ty that, in separate families, would leave every 
member poor. These new associations are com- 
posed of men and women of superior talents and 
sentiments ; yet it may easily be questioned wheth- 
er such a community will draw, except in its begin- 
nings, the able and the good ; whether those who 
have energy will not prefer their chance of superi- 
ority and power in the world, to the humble cer- 
tainties of the association ; whether such a retreat 
does not promise to become an asylum to those who 
have tried and failed, rather than a field to the 
strong ; and whether the members will not necessa- 
rily be fractions of men, because each finds that he 
cannot enter it without some compromise. Friend- 
ship and association are very fine things, and a 
grand phalanx of the best of the human race, band- 
ed for some catholic object ; yes, excellent ; but re- 
member that no society can ever be so large as one 
man. He, in his friendship, in his natural and mo- 
mentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself ; 
but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to 
two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the 
stature of one. 



252 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

But the men of less faitli could not thus believe, 
and to such, concert appears the sole specific of 
strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but 
perhaps together we shall not fail. Our house- 
keeping is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a 
phalanx, a community, might be. Many of us have 
differed in oj^inion, and we could find no man who 
could make the truth plain, but possibly a college, 
or an ecclesiastical council, might. I have not been 
able either to persuade my brother or to prevail 
on myself to disuse the traffic or the potation of 
brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence 
might effectually restrain us. The candidate my 
party votes for is not to be trusted with a dollar, 
but he will be honest in the Senate, for we can 
bring public opinion to bear on him. Thus concert 
was the specific in all cases. But concert is neither 
better nor worse, neither more nor less potent, than 
individual force. All the men in the world cannot 
make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop 
of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one 
man can. But let there be one man, let there be 
truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert for 
the first time possible ; because the force which 
moves the world is a new quality, and can never be 
furnished by adding whatever quantities of a differ- 
ent kind. What is the use of the concert of the 
false and the disunited ? There can be no concert 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 253 

in two, wliere there is no concert in one. When 
the individual is not individual^ but is dual ; when 
his thoughts look one way and his actions another ; 
when his faith is traversed b}/ his habits ; when his 
will, enlightened by reason, is warped by his sense ; 
when with one hand he rows and with the other 
backs water, what concert can be ? 

I do not wonder at the interest these projects in- 
spire. The world is awaking to the idea of union, 
and these experiments show what it is thinking of. 
It is and will be magic. Men will live and com- 
municate, and plough, and reap, and govern, as by 
added ethereal power, when once they are united ; 
as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and 
respiration exactly together, four persons lift a 
heavy man from the ground by the little finger 
only, and without sense of weight. But this union 
must be inward, and not one of covenants, and is 
to be reached by a reverse of the methods they 
use. The union is only perfect when all the miiters 
are isolated. It is the union of friends who live in 
different streets or towns. Each man, if he attempts 
to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped 
and diminished of his proportion ; and the stricter 
the union the smaller and the more pitiful he is. 
But leave him alone, to recognize in ever}^ hour and 
place the secret soul ; he will go up and down doing 
the works of a true member, and, to the astonish- 



254 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

ment of all, the work will be done witli concert, 
tliougli no man spoke. Government will be ada- 
mantine \yitliout any governor. The union must be 
ideal in actual individualism. 

I pass to the indication in some particulars of 
that faith in man, which the heart is preaching to 
us in these days, and which engages the more re- 
gard, from the consideration that the speculations 
of one generation are the history of the next fol- 
lowing. 

In alluding just now to our system of education, 
I spoke of the deadness of its details. But it is 
open to graver criticism than the palsy of its mem- 
bers : it is a system of despair. The disease with 
which the human mind now labors is want of faith. 
Men do not believe in a power of education. We 
do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in 
man, and we do not try. We renounce all high 
aims. We believe that the defects of so many 
perverse and so many frivolous people who make 
up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of 
incurables. A man of good sense but of little faith, 
whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as 
often as he went there, said to me that " he liked 
to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other 
public amusements go on." I am afraid the re^ 
mark is too honest, and comes from the same ori- 
gin as the maxim of the tyrant, '' If you would rule 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 255 

tlie world quietly, you must keep it amused." I 
notice too tliat tlie ground on wliicli eminent public 
servants urge the claims of popular education is 
fear ; ' This country is filling up with thousands 
and millions of voters, and you must educate them 
to keep them from our throats.' We do not be- 
lieve that any education, any system of philosophy, 
any influence of genius, will ever give depth of in- 
sight to a superficial mind. Having settled our- 
selves into this infidelity, our skill is expended to 
procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adorn 
the victim with manual skill, his tongue with lan- 
guages, his body with inoffensive and comely man- 
ners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of 
limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it 
strange that society should be devoured by a secret 
melancholy which breaks through all its smiles and 
all its gayety and games ? 

But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. 
It appears that some doubt is felt by good and wise 
men whether really the happiness and probity of 
men is increased by the culture of the mind in those 
disciplines to which we give the name of education. 
Unhappily too the doubt comes from scholars, from 
persons who have tried these methods. In their 
experience the scholar was not raised by the sa- 
cred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used 
them to selfish ends. He was a profane person. 



256 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

and became a showman, turning his gifts to a mar- 
ketable use, and not to his own sustenance and 
growth. It was found that the intellect could be 
independently developed, that is, in separation from 
the man, as any single organ can be invigorated, 
and the result was monstrous. A canine appetite 
for knowledge was generated, which must still be 
fed but was never satisfied, and this knowledge, not 
being directed on action, never took the character 
of substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom 
it entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of 
expression, the power of speech, the power of po- 
etry, of literary art, but it did not bring him to 
peace or to beneficence. 

When the literary class betray a destitution of 
faith, it is not strange that society should be dis- 
heartened and sensualized by unbelief. What rem- 
edy ? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We 
must go up to a higher platform, to which we are 
always invited to ascend ; there, the whole aspect 
of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our 
education and of our educated men. I do not be- 
lieve that the differences of opinion and character 
in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the 
class of the good and the wise, a permanent class 
of skeptics, or a class of conservatives, or of malig- 
nants, or of materialists. I do not believe in two 
classes. You remember the story of the poor wo- 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 257 

man who importuned King Philip o£ Macedon to 
grant her justice, which Philip refused : the woman 
exclaimed, " I appeal : " the king, astonished, asked 
to whom she appealed : the woman replied, " From 
Philip drunk to Pliilip sober." The text will suit 
me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, 
but in man in two moods, in Philip drunk and 
Philip sober. I think, according to the good- 
hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soul is 
deprived of truth." Iron conservative, miser, or 
thief, no man is but by a supposed necessity which 
he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The 
soul lets no man go without some visitations and 
holy days of a diviner presence. It would be easy 
to show, by a narrow scanning of any man's biog- 
raphy, that we are not so wedded to our paltry per- 
formances of every kind but that every man has at 
intervals the grace to scorn his performances, in 
comparing them with his belief of what he should 
do ; — that he puts himself on the side of his ene- 
mies, listening gladly to what they say of him, and 
accusing himself of the same things. 

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite 
hope, which degrades all it has done ? Genius 
counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own 
idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the 
Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic minster, 
the German anthem, when they are ended, the 

VOL. m. 17 



258 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

master casts behind Mm. How sinks tlie song in 
the waves of melody wliicli tlie universe pours over 
his soul ! Before that gracious Infinite out of which 
he drew these few strokes, how mean they look, 
though the praises of the world attend them. From 
the triumphs of his art he turns with desire to this 
greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With 
silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty 
that eclipses all which his hands have done ; all 
which human hands have ever done. 

Well, we are all the children of genius, the chil- 
dren of virtue, — and feel their inspirations in our 
happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a rad- 
ical in politics ? Men are conservatives when they 
are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. 
They are conservatives after dinner, or before tak- 
ing their rest ; when they are sick, or aged : in the 
morning, or when their intellect or their conscience 
has been aroused ; when they hear music, or when 
they read poetry, they are radicals. In the circle 
of the rankest tories that could be collected in Eng- 
land, Old or New, let a powerful and stimulating 
intellect, a man of great heart and mind act on 
them, and very quickly these frozen conservators 
will yield to the friendly influence, these hopeless 
will begin to hope, these haters will begin to love, 
these immovable statues will begin to spin and re- 
volve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 259 

wliicli Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he 
was preparing to leave England with his plan of 
planting the gospel among the American savages. 
" Lord Bathurst told me that the members of the 
Scriblerus club being met at his house at dinner, 
they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his 
guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, hav- 
ing listened to the many lively things they had to 
say, begged to be heard in his turn, and displayed 
his plan with such an astonishing and animating 
force of eloquence and enthusiasm that they were 
struck dumb, and, after some pause, rose up all to- 
gether with earnestness, exclaiming, ' Let us set out 
with him immediately.' " Men in all ways are bet- 
ter than they seem. They like flattery for the mo- 
ment, but they know the truth for their own. It is 
a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting 
them and speaking to them rude truth. They re- 
sent your honesty for an instant, they will thank 
you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of 
each other ? Is it to be pleased and flattered ? No, 
but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out 
of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, in- 
stead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of 
gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itself 
so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of reality, 
though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so, — 
by this manlike love of truth, — those excesses and 



260 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

errors into wliicli souls of great vigor, but not equal 
insight, often fall. Tliej feel the poverty at the 
bottom of ail the seeming affluence of the world. 
They know the speed with which they come straight 
through the thin masquerade, and conceive a dis- 
gust at the indigence of nature : Rousseau, Mira- 
beau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron, — and I could 
easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, who 
drive their steeds so hard, in the violence of living 
to forget its illusion : they would know the worst, 
and tread the floors of hell. The heroes of ancient 
and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, 
Alexander, C^sar, have treated life and fortune as 
a game to be well and skilfully played, but the 
stake not to be so valued but that any time it could 
be held as a trifle light as air, and thrown up. 
Caesar, just before the battle of Pharsalia, dis- 
courses with the Egyptian priest concerning the 
fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit the army, 
the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show him 
those mysterious sources. 

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social 
relations, in the preference, namely, which each 
man gives to the society of superiors over that of 
his equals. All that a man has will he give for 
right relations with his mates. All that he has 
will he give for an erect demeanor in every com- 
pany and on each occasion. He aims at such 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 261 

things as liis neighbors prize, and gives his clays 
and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a 
good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sight as 
a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, 
of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his pro- 
fession ; a naval and military honor, a general's 
commission, a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the 
laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowl- 
edgment of eminent merit, — have this lustre for 
each candidate that they enable him to walk erect 
and unashamed in the presence of some persons be- 
fore whom he felt himself inferior. Having raised 
himself to this rank, having established his equal- 
ity with class after class of those with whom he 
would live well, he still finds certain others be- 
fore whom he cannot possess himself, because they 
have somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat 
purer, which extorts homage of him. Is his ambi- 
tion pure ? then will his laurels and his possessions 
seem worthless : instead of avoiding these men who 
make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him 
and seek their society only, woo and embrace this 
his humiliation and mortification, until he shall 
know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his 
brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He 
is sure that the soul which gives the lie to all 
things will tell none. His constitution will not 
mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought. 



262 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

higli and unmatchable in tlie presence of any man ; 
if the secret oracles whose whisper makes the sweet- 
ness and dignity of his life do here withdraw and 
accompany him no longer, — it is time to under- 
value what he has valued, to dispossess himself of 
what he has acquired, and with Csesar to take in 
his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and 
say, " All these will I relinquish, if you will show 
me the fountains of the Nile." Dear to us are 
those who love us ; the swift moments we spend 
with them are a compensation for a great deal of 
misery ; they enlarge our life ; — but dearer are 
those who reject us as unworthy, for they add an- 
other life : they build a heaven before us whereof 
we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new 
powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us 
to new and unattempted performpaices. 

As every man at heart wishes the best and not 
inferior society, wishes to be convicted of his error 
and to come to himself, — so he wishes that the same 
healing should not stop in his thought, but should 
penetrate his will or active power. The selfish 
man suffers more from his selfishness than he from 
whom that selfishness withholds some important 
benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to 
some higher platform, that he may see beyond his 
present fear the transalpine good, so that his fear, 
his coldness, his custom may be broken up like 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 263 

fragments of ice, melted and carried away in tlie 
great stream of good will. Do you ask my aid ? 
I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be 
a benefactor and servant than you wish to be 
served by me ; and surely the greatest good fortune 
that could befall me is precisely to be so moved by 
you that I should say, ' Take me and all mine, and 
use me and mine freely to your ends ! ' for I could 
not say it otherwise than because a great enlarge- 
ment had come to my heart and mind, which made 
me superior to my fortunes. Here we are para- 
lyzed with fear ; we hold on to our little properties, 
house and land, offi.ce and money, for the bread 
which they have in our experience yielded us, al- 
though we confess that our being does not flow 
through them. We desire to be made great ; we 
desire to be touched with that fire which shall com- 
mand this ice to stream, and make our existence a 
benefit. If therefore we start objections to your 
project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor 
or of the race, understand well that it is because 
we wish to^ drive you to drive us into your meas- 
ures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We 
are haunted with a belief that you have a secret 
which it would highliest advantage us to learn, and 
we would force you to impart it to us, though it 
should bring us to prison or to worse extremity. 
Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every 



264 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. ' 

man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no 
pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of 
the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy 
and profanation. There is no skepticism, no athe- 
ism but that. Could it be received into common 
belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has 
had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but 
each man's innocence and his real liking of his 
neighbor have kept it a dead letter. I remember 
standing at the poUs one day when the anger of 
the political contest gave a certain grimness to the 
faces of the independent electors, and a good man 
at my side, looking on the people, remarked, " I am 
satisfied that the largest part of these men, on ei- 
ther side, mean to vote right." I suppose consider- 
ate observers, looking at the masses of men in their 
blameless and in their equivocal actions, will assent, 
that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the gen- 
eral purpose in the great number of persons is fidel- 
ity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to 
your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, 
is in you : he refuses to accept you as a bringer of 
truth, because though you think you have it, he 
feels that you have it not. You have not given him 
the authentic sign. 

If it were worth while to run into details this 
general doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting 
Spirit, it would be easy to adduce illustration in 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 265 

particulars of a man's equality to the Church, of 
his equality to the State, and of his equality to 
every other man. It is yet in all men's memory 
that, a few years ago, the liberal churches com- 
plained that the Calvinistic church denied to them 
the name of Christian. I think the complaint was 
confession : a religious church would not complain. 
A religious man, like Behmen, Fox, or Sweden- 
borg is not irritated by wanting the sanction of the 
Church, but the Church feels the accusation of his 
presence and belief. 

It only needs that a just man should walk in our 
streets to make it appear how pitiful and inarti- 
ficial a contrivance is our legislation. The man 
whose part is taken and who does not wait for 
society in anything, has a power which society can- 
not choose but feel. The familiar experiment called 
the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary col- 
umn of water balances the ocean, is a symbol of the 
relation of one man to the whole family of men. 
The wise Dandamis, on hearing the lives of Soc- 
rates, Pythagoras and Diogenes read, " judged 
them to be great men every way, excepting that 
they were too much subjected to the reverence of 
the laws, which to second and authorize, true vir- 
tue must abate very much of its original vigor." 

And as a man is equal to the Church and equal 
to the State, so he is equal to every other man. 



266 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

The disparities of power in men are superficial; 
and all frank and searching conversation, in which 
a man lays himself open to his brother, apprises 
each of their radical unity. When two persons sit 
and converse in a thoroughly good understanding, 
the remark is sure to be made, See how we have 
disputed about words! Let a clear, apprehensive 
mind, such as every man knows among his friends, 
converse with the most commanding poetic genius, 
I think it would appear that there was no inequal- 
ity such as men fancy, between them ; that a per- 
fect understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiv- 
ing, abolished differences ; and the poet would con- 
fess that Ms creative imagination gave him no deep 
advantage, but only the superficial one that he 
could express himseK and the other could not ; that 
his advantage was a knack, which might impose on 
indolent men but could not impose on lovers of 
truth; for they know the tax of talent, or what a 
price of greatness the power of expression too often 
pays. I believe it is the conviction of the purest 
men that the net amount of man and man does not 
much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his 
companion in some faculty. His want of skill in 
other directions has added to his fitness for his own 
work. Each seems to have some compensation 
yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hinder- 
ance operates as a concentration of his force. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 267 

These and the like experiences intimate that 
man stands in strict connection with a higher fact 
never yet manifested. There is power over and 
behind us, and we are the channels of its commu- 
nications. We seek to say thus and so, and over 
our head some spirit sits which contradicts what 
we say. We would persuade our fellow to this 
or that ; another self within our eyes dissuades 
him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In 
vain we compose our faces and our words ; it holds 
uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and 
he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. 
We exclaim, ' There 's a traitor in the house I ' but 
at last it appears that he is the true man, and I v.m 
the traitor. This open channel to the highest life 
is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet 
so tenacious, that although I have never expressed 
the truth, and although I have never heard the 
expression of it from any other, I know that the 
whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot 
answer your questions ? I am not pained that I 
cannot frame a reply to the question. What is the 
operation we call Providence ? There lies the un- 
sj)oken thing, present, omnipresent. Every time 
we converse we seek to translate it into speech, 
but whether we hit or whether we miss, we have 
the fact. Every discourse is an approximate an- 
swer : but it is of small consequence that we do 



268 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 

not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides 
for contemplation forever. 

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall 
make themselves good in time, the man who shall 
be born, whose advent men and events prepare and 
foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection 
with a higher life, with the man within man ; shall 
destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native 
but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of 
flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive 
and beautiful which works over our heads and 
under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our suc- 
cess when we obey it, and of our ruin when we 
contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, 
else the word justice would have no meaning : they 
believe that the best is the true ; that right is done 
at last ; or chaos would come. It rewards actions 
after their nature, and not after the design of the 
agent. ' Work,' it saith to man, ' in every hour, 
paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou 
canst not escape the reward : whether thy work be 
fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so 
only it be honest work, done to thine own appro- 
bation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well 
as to the thought : no matter how often defeated, 
you are born to victory. The reward of a thing 
well done, is to have done it.' 

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 269 

surfaces, and to see how tliis high will prevails 
without an exception or an interval, he settles him- 
self into serenity. He can already rely on the laws 
of gravity, that every stone will fall where it is 
due ; the good globe is faithful, and carries us 
securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or 
resigned, we need not interfere to help it on : and 
he will learn one day the mild lesson they teach, 
that our own orbit is all our task, and we need not 
assist the administration of the universe. Do not 
be so impatient to set the town right concerning 
the unfounded pretensions and the false reputation 
of certain men of standing. They are laboring 
harder to set the town right concerning themselves, 
and will certainly succeed. Suppress for a few 
days your criticism on the insufficiency of this or 
that teacher or experimenter, and he will have 
demonstrated his insufficiency to all men's eyes. 
In like manner, let a man fall into the divine cir- 
cuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius 
is the only liberating influence. We wish to escape 
from subjection and a sense of inferiority, and we 
make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we 
eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail : it is 
all in vain ; only by obedience to his genius, only 
by the freest activity in the way constitutional to 
him, does an angel seem to arise before a man and 
lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the 
prison. 



3^ ^ /' "^^yy^^ 

270 NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. ^ 

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and 
wonder as we are, is cheerfuhiess and courage, and 
the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The life 
of man is the true romance, which when it is val- 
iantly conducted will yield the imagination a higher 
joy than any fiction. All around us what powers 
are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of cus- 
tom, and all wonder prevented. It is so wonderful 
to our neurologists that a man can see without his 
eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is jast 
as wonderful that he should see with them ; and 
that is ever the difference between the wise and the 
unwise : the latter wonders at what is unusual, the 
wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the 
heart which has received so much, trust the Power 
by which it lives ? May it not quit other leadings, 
and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently 
and taught it so much, secure that the future will 
be worthy of the past ? 



RECEIVED. ^« 



*4^brab.1 




